


Embers

by sciosophia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Abandonment, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Background Relationships, Ben Solo in plaid, Canonical Character Death, Denial of Feelings, Emotional Baggage, Emotions, Eventual Smut, Exes, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Feels, Getting Back Together, Grief/Mourning, Healthy Relationships, Hurts So Good, Loss of Parent(s), Mutual Pining, Personal Growth, Pining, Post-Break Up, References to Child Abandonment, Safer Sex, Sexual Content, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Slow Romance, Smut, Therapy, Unhealthy Relationships, Unresolved Emotional Tension, ben is getting emotionally healthy, can it be slow burn if they're already exes?, discussions about safe sex, discussions about therapy, references to therapy, rey also needs to get emotionally healthy, safe sex, safe sex as character work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-08-21 15:36:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16579316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciosophia/pseuds/sciosophia
Summary: All the myriad things he’d been—someone who made her laugh; the warmth on the other side of the bed; her best friend—those things, Rey had buried.Rey left Ben two years, three months, and sixteen days ago. But who's counting?





	1. Thursday.

**Author's Note:**

> My eternal thanks to [RebelRebel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RebelRebel/pseuds/RebelRebel), the most wonderful beta (and a brilliant writer whose fics you must all read), and to The Writing Den for your enthusiasm, encouragement, and emojis.
> 
> Rated E for eventual smut.
> 
> I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sciosophia) if you'd like to say hi.

**_Embers_**  
ˈɛmbəz _noun_  
1\. the smoldering remains of a fire  
2\. slowly dying or fading emotions, memories,  
ideas, or responses **_still capable of being revived_**

 

 

_Thursday._

It was fall in Dutchess County, and the weather was beautiful.

Now they'd left the NY 9N, Rey rolled the window down, twisting in her seat to lean on the edge and watch the scenery pass. The trees which lined the road were making cut-outs of the sunshine, dappling everything in mid-morning gold, and she could see the Hudson Highlands rising up in between. The leaves had turned red and yellow, colours which looked the way the air tasted; fresh and crisp.

“Hey, can you check the GPS?”

Rose kept her eyes on the road, winding ahead of them. Rey leaned over and picked up Rose’s phone. The speaker had died in a soda-related incident near White Plains and taken the Google Maps lady with it, so Rey had been designated direction-checker for the last forty miles.

“There's a left coming up,” she said; and then, seeing the iMessage notifications at the top of the screen, she uttered a soft, “Ah, fuck.”

Rose’s head turned, and then her instinct to watch the road kicked back in. “What is it?”

Rey read Finn’s message again.

“Hey. Rey.” Rose slowed into the upcoming turn. “What’s up? Is something wrong—”

“No, no.” Rey tried to let her brain catch up with her mouth. “No, sorry, it’s fine, it’s just Finn. He’s letting us know Leia’s arrived early, so. She’ll be at the house when we get there.”

Rose’s eyes widened. “Oh, _fuck._ Is Ben—”

“With her, yeah.”

Rey looked at the group chat again. Finn was typing.

**Today** 9:17AM

Rose  
**Rose:** just leaving the apartment noooow  
**Today** 10:12AM

**Rey:** yoooo me and rose are on the freeway!  
**Today** 10:14AM  
Finn  
**Finn:** yay! see you soon (Smiling Face With Heart-Shaped Eyes )  
**Today** 10:37AM  
Finn  
**Finn:** ahhhh leia's arrived early  
**Finn:** ben is with her  
**Today** 11:23AM  
Finn  
Finn is typing...

Then:

**Finn:** rey???  
**Finn:** im so sorry!  
**Finn:** they were meant to arrive on saturday but last minute change of plan  
**Finn:** we just found out

She grabbed her own phone from her bag, stashed in the footwell.

**Rey:** sorry had my phone on silent  
**Rey:** dont worry (Yellow Heart emoji)

And then, for good measure:

**Rey:** its honestly fine  
**Rey:** nbd  
**Rey:** me and ben are adults  
**Rey:** we can handle an extra few days

They _could_ handle it, she told herself, clutching the phone tight against her palm. She’d known this was coming, ever since Poe had quietly asked if it was okay for Leia to bring Ben as her plus one _—of course, you idiot, you can invite who you like, it’s your wedding—_ and they would simply have to put things to the side (even if those _things_ still hurt, so deeply that Rey refused to think about them; to think about Ben at all).

The group chat lit up again, this time with Poe.

**Today** 11:24AM  
Poe  
**Poe:** blame my dad x  
**Poe:** he asked leia to come up early and forgot ben is with her x

“Apparently it’s Kes’s fault,” she said to Rose. In the group chat she replied with a kiss emoji because it was all she had the energy for, and then she locked her screen, throwing the phone back into the footwell. A dull _thunk_ near her foot told Rey she’d missed the backpack.

She calculated it in her head. Thursday night, all of Friday and Saturday, Sunday morning. _That’ll be fine,_ she told herself. Of course it would be. _Fine, fine, fine._

Rose was silent, still looking ahead as they wound further into the trees. The second-hand version of Rey and Ben’s relationship—the abstract one, made up of all the words which Rose and Rey had passed between them—and all her tears, too—that history hung in the air, weighing it down.

Rose turned in at the sign which said _Skygazer Hill Lodge ½ mile._ “Do you want me to stop the car? We don’t have to go in straight away. If you want to talk about it.”

She eased off the gas pedal. Rey could already feel the car slowing under them.

“No.” She shook her head. “It’s okay. Me and Ben were…a long time ago. It’s nothing. Ben’s nothing. He’s just a guy.”

 _Just a guy._ Poe’s childhood friend; a lobbyist; someone who could run marathons in less than four hours. These were the labels she’d reduced Ben down to; boxes to compartmentalise him in, entirely separate from their relationship. The rest, all the myriad things he’d been _—someone who made her laugh; the warmth on the other side of the bed; her best friend—_ those things, Rey had buried.

“Well.” Rose still hadn’t pushed back on the gas pedal. Now the light between the trees was passing over them in slower, brighter waves. “If you’re sure.”

Rey watched the river birch and the pitch pines pass. “I’m sure.”

Rose took one hand from the steering wheel and sought out Rey’s, searching the edge of the passenger seat with her fingers until she could find it, and squeezed.

It struck Rey, as she squeezed back, that Rose was about watch her ex get _married._ No matter that Rose and Finn had done things the wrong way around, had been a couple first and _then_ best friends, or that Rose had set Finn up with the guy he was going to marry in the first place.

“I can hear you thinking.” Rose let go of Rey’s fingers and returned her own to the steering wheel. “And it’s totally different. Finn’s not an asshole, for a start.”

That, Rey reflected, was very true.

They made their final turn into the last stretch of driveway, and a grand old house reared up before them. It was wide and winged, filled with rows of windows reflecting the fall foliage back at them, so that the glass looked like it was on fire. The wooden, white-painted exterior gleamed in the sun, and a veranda curved around it. Even from here they could see someone had begun the job of twining orange flowers into the railings.

There were three cars parked in the drive, and Rey recognised all of them. One belonged to Kes, and the middle car was Finn and Poe’s; a beaten-up old Chevrolet which Poe had owned forever and affectionately nicknamed the _X-Wing._ It was still painted black with a shock of orange down the side, the way it had been when, as Poe liked to tell it, he’d bought it from a random guy in Daytona Beach ten years previously.

The last car, a black Maserati, Rey would have known anywhere.

Her stomach lurched, and her muscles tensed, like she might leap from Rose’s still-moving car. _It’s nothing,_ she chanted in her head. Finn appeared on the veranda, and he waved.  _Nothing,_ she reminded herself, waving back.

Finn’s grin was bright even from ten yards away, and as Rose parked he jumped down the front steps. Rose killed the ignition and waved through the windscreen, grinning, before she left the car. Rey took a deep breath and pushed open the passenger door. Rose had parked as far away from the Maserati as it was possible to, and Rey kept her gaze turned from it as she followed.

At the foot of the front steps Finn was hugging Rose so hard he’d lifted her off her feet, his face and grin crushed into her shoulder. Their laughter joined the birdsong in the trees. Poe followed from the house, more languidly than his fiancé but grinning all the same. He paused on the veranda and waved.

Finn set Rose down and reached out, grasping Rey by the wrist and tugging. She went willingly, and folded into his embrace. Behind them, Poe and Rose’s reunion filled the veranda steps with enthusiastic noise.

Rey breathed Finn in, squeezed her eyes shut. He smelled of clean skin and soap.

She leaned back and grinned at him. “Hi.”

He grinned back. “Hi.”

Over Finn’s shoulder, Poe squashed Rose into his side and called across, “Hey, it’s my best girls.”

“Best women,” Rey corrected. “Officially.”

“Semantics.” He gestured them over. “You coming in? We can get your bags later.”

Finn answered before Rey could.

“Two minutes? We’ll follow you.”

Poe nodded. His grin set a little more rigid, and there was a split-second of silent communication between them before he was turning and pulling Rose with him. His chatter faded inside the house and then cut off with the slam of the closing door.

“You okay?” Finn asked, quietly. He was wearing that _look;_ the one where he jutted out his bottom lip and frowned, just the tiniest bit.

Rey smiled, showing all her teeth. “Of course.”

He didn’t reflect her cheerfulness. “I can still ask him to leave. I don’t care if Kes invited them up early, you’re my best friend, I can weather a fight with my father-in-law for that.”

“He’s not your father-in-law until Saturday—”

“Don’t, Rey, please.”

At last her overwide grin fell. Finn was worried, she could tell from the set of his jaw; the same look he’d had when he applied for LMSW licensure, when they’d sat for hours in the ER because Poe had broken his leg falling off a motorbike.

“I’m not—it’s not…” she struggled. She knew what was riling him, in an abstract way—all the times she’d said _it’s fine, I’m fine,_ because he didn’t believe her. But it had been two years, and the right thing to do. She was over it.

“Look, we all knew this was going to happen eventually,” she said, placing a placating hand on his shoulder. “Ben must know I’ll be here and you don’t see him running for the hills, I don’t think, and—really, you’re getting married, Finn! You have bigger things to think about.” She squeezed his shoulder. “Promise me? That the minute we step over the threshold you’ll stop worrying about me?”

The set of his jaw didn’t change—just worked for a few seconds, holding back what he wanted to say, until:

“Alright, if _—if—_ you promise you’ll tell me if you...if you change your mind. Okay?”

Rey nodded.

“I pinky-swear,” she said, holding out her finger.

Finn raised an eyebrow. “I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

She waved her hand. Finn’s expression was stiff for a moment; and then he held his out too.

“Pinky-swear,” he muttered. Their hands dropped, and he sighed. “Look, Ben’s taken Bibi for walk, so…you’ve got some time, before you see him.”

Rey’s stomach flipped, and she ignored it. Bibi was Kes’s dog—well, Poe’s really, but their New York apartment was too small for him, and so his father had become the full-time babysitter—and she told herself that’s what it was for. She was excited to see the dog again; that was it.

“You’re a good egg,” Rey said, because the alternative—explaining how the protectiveness in Finn’s voice was balm enough; how all the ways they’d looked out for each other in the past ten years were overwhelming her—felt too big for words. She pressed a kiss to his cheek and said, nodding towards the house, “Come on.”

* * *

Inside, the scent of cooking came to them on a wave of warm air, a combination of garlic and spices and tomatoes, and they followed it in the direction of the kitchen. The sounds of activity grew louder as they approached. Rey could hear the clanking of utensils and the simmer of a gas stove.

“Kes is making tamales,” Finn explained.

It was true; Kes was holding court at the kitchen island, portioning masa dough onto squares of banana leaf and filling the dough with salsa and cooked chicken. Poe was marinating more meat, and Rose had already been set to soaking the rest of the banana leaves in a large pan of water.

Ben’s mother was at the other end of the kitchen island, slicing bell peppers.

A trace of Rey’s nerves seeped through before she could stop them; a spasm of guilt, reminding her how far away in time they were from Leia’s spare bedroom, from Rey’s tears on her shoulder. From the final time Leia had seen her, getting into Finn’s car with the last cardboard box and driving away.

Everyone looked up at the sound of Rey’s shoes on the kitchen tiles, except for Kes, who waved with the hand which wasn’t spooning salsa over the tamales. Leia’s eyes, watching her from across the room, were as dark as Rey remembered them. Today, as she paused with a large kitchen knife in her hand, they were also unreadable.

“Hi,” Rey said.

There was a slight pause, in which Leia seemed to be considering her. It was the same look Rey imagined she’d once given to her Air Force cadets.

She peered over the frames of her glasses and said, “Hello, Rey.”

Kes set down the spoon and wiped his hands on the dishcloth thrown over one shoulder. Like his son he was short and handsome, with thick hair, now almost completely grey; but Poe had inherited his eyes from his mother. Kes’s were lighter, though the warmth in them was the same.

“C'mere.” He held out his arms. The embrace was heartfelt, the way everything was here, with these people; but there was something a little extra in it that felt like an apology. He leaned back. “¿Qué onda?”

Rey smiled. “I’m good.”

 _“Good,_ ‘cause we’ve got more tamales to make. Roll up your sleeves and get in the production line, kid. You too, Finn, get back over here.”

He nudged Rey left; whether it was purposefully towards Leia she couldn’t say, but the effect was the same, sandwiching her between Kes and her ex-boyfriend’s mother; so she picked up a knife and the closest bell pepper, and began to chop.

Kes was directing the food prep like it was one of his old Air Force ops _—alright, Rose, now just put those leaves over here; Finn, can you check the oven temperature?—_ but Rey could only concentrate on the rhythmic sound of Leia’s knife against the chopping board; _chop, chop, chop._ The more Rey listened, the more accusatory it sounded; the more like _why? didn’t? you? call?_

Even in here, where the scent of cooking was overwhelming, Leia still smelled the same; _La Prairie_ hand cream, from the $120 tube she kept in her purse. Rey still caught that scent sometimes at the Nordstrom in Union Square, on days when an impulse she refused to name would take her feet across town. More than once she’d stood at the beauty counter and rubbed free samples of memory-scented cream into her skin.  
  
Now, Leia reached across and stilled Rey’s hand, adjusting the knife under her fingers.  
  
“Cut lengthways,” she said. “Kes wants them like this.”  
  
She withdrew without looking up, but the touch lingered, a warm imprint.  
  
“It’s good to see you,” Rey said after a moment. She adjusted accordingly and cut the rest of the pepper lengthways. There were other words in her mouth, a warm imprint of their own sitting on her tongue, but she couldn’t shape them, couldn’t force them out. _I’m sorry I never said goodbye. I’m sorry I didn’t call._  
  
Leia brushed slices of pepper off the end of her chopping board and into a large bowl.  
  
"You've changed your hair," she said.  
  
It was true: Rey had let it grow out and left it down. No more buns, or braids, or half-ponytails. It was cliché, wasn’t it, to change your hair after a break-up? That must have been what Leia was thinking.

 _It wasn’t about Ben,_ Rey wanted to say. _It was about everything._ More than anything it had been about the mother she could barely remember, who’d put Rey’s hair into three buns for a long-ago passport photo. It was the only photograph she had of herself before the age of six.

Leia smiled. Something tense and twisted-up inside Rey uncoiled.

“I only meant that it suits you.” She paused. “You look well, Rey.”  
  
It was soft, the way Leia said it, imbued with so many things, and Rey looked back down at the pepper on her own chopping board and turned it uselessly from end to end.

“Thank you. So do you.”

Leia laughed.

“I look old, but thank you all the same.”

There was a pause, filled by the talk of the others, and then—  
  
“Poe told us, earlier, that you and Rose were almost here, and then my son spontaneously took the dog for a walk.” _Chop, chop, chop._ “So I’m sorry he’s not around to greet you like he should be, if he still has any of those manners I taught him.”

As far as Rey was concerned, she and Ben didn’t have a single obligation to each other—he could have walked back to New York City if he’d wanted to—but she caught the angry pitch of Leia’s words, and nodded.

“Maybe he just needed some time,” she said.

 _I need time._ That’s what she’d told Ben, at the end. She wondered if Leia knew.

* * *

The tamales were in the oven, and Rey and Rose got their bags from the car and found their room. It was off the top floor of the house, a sliver of converted attic they could access from the hallway by a small, steep set of white wooden stairs. They emerged into a space under the eaves; small, with a sloping ceiling that forced Rey to crouch a little, but light and clean and comfortable, just like the rest of the house. Everything was old on the outside and newly, purposefully antiquated within.

“Well, this is picturesque.” Rose flopped down on one of the little beds, which were clearly sized for children, and gestured to the window.

She wasn't wrong. The skylight took up a structurally preposterous amount of the roof, and because of the house's position, high up in the foothills, the Hudson Highlands stretched out in the rectangular window like a postcard.

Rey leaned against the glass, palms outward. She’d always liked mountains. Her early childhood had been spent on the outskirts of Almería, tucked into a Spanish hillside, and she could remember walking along the pavement during hot, dry summers, holding her mother’s hand and looking _up-up-up_ to where the hills rose above them and turned into the desert-like stretch of the _Sierra de Gádor._ When she’d returned to the country of her birth, six years old and all alone, the wet, flat landscapes of England had felt completely alien.

Perhaps that was why she liked New York so much. Skyscrapers were mountains too, in their own way.

Behind her Rose was unpacking, judging by the sound of a suitcase zip and the rustle of unfolding fabric. Rey looked further down, out to the gardens, a rolling expanse of grass that lay out neat and flat, dotted with trees, until it eventually tilted at a slight angle, following the incline of the hill to meet the woods beyond.

“How was it? Talking to Leia?”

Rey didn’t turn; only pressed her palms flatter against the window.

“Fine.” That word again. “It was nice to catch up.”

They’d discussed long-exchanged recipes; Rey’s _ajo colorao_ and Leia’s honey cake (which had reminded Rey so much of Ben that she’d put the handwritten recipe in the back of her nightstand and never made it again—but she hadn’t mentioned that).

“Did you…talk about Ben?”

Rose said it like Rey was made of glass; as though his name might shatter her.

“Yeah, a bit.” It had only been small things. That he was well. That he was _here._ Leia hadn’t looked up from her work as she’d said, _I should let him catch you up._ It had left the briefest bitter taste of trepidation on Rey’s tongue, wondering what she needed to be caught up on. Then she’d pushed it aside.

Rey saw it, then, the little flicker of movement in the corner of her vision, down where the lawn turned into a forest of birch trees. It was Bibi, trotting out of the foliage on his little Corgi legs. Sure enough, seconds later, Ben followed.

Rey’s heart gave no warning before it turned itself on end and inside out. The entire sensation was like slamming into the flat surface of water; stinging and shocking and painful.

Ben was walking slowly behind Bibi, who had raced off across the lawn and was now gamboling back and forth between Ben and various points of interest; a plant pot, a bench, a shrubbery. Ben was wearing red, a plaid shirt that symphonised with the fall leaves behind him. He carried a stick loosely in one hand; clearly a gift from the dog.

 _I bought that shirt,_ Rey thought, a nonsensical non-sequitur; but she could recall it in abruptly vivid detail, picking it off the rack at a thrift store in Bushwick and deciding that, yes, _Ben would like this._

On the lawn, Ben leaned down to scratch Bibi behind the ears. He was smiling; not that rare wide grin, the one she’d liked best and had forced herself to forget, but something soft, something _calm;_ something which felt, to Rey, entirely new.

 _Calm_ had never been a word to associate with Ben.

From somewhere below, Poe called the dog. Out on the lawn Bibi’s ears pricked up and he bounded towards the house, vanishing from view. She heard the _clack_ of his claws on the wooden floors below, heard the intangible praise Poe was lavishing on his dog—and she could picture it, Poe bent down on his knees, scratching him behind the ears and then, when Bibi would inevitably roll over, on the soft white fur of his belly.

Ben was alone on the grass, and he stood up, turned to look across the same wide vista Rey had been admiring. Her heart was still pounding against her ribs, but the initial stupor had diminished. Her head cleared a little.

Ben looked—different.

It wasn't his hair, or his face, both of which were still perfect, and pretty much just as she'd left them. No; it wasn’t that. He was—

“Relaxed.” She whispered it as she watched Ben watching the horizon. That was it. The Ben she'd loved and forced herself to forget had been permanently on edge, holding himself like there were fishhooks puncturing his shoulders, pulling him taut and tense on some invisible string. _This_ Ben, the one who had brought a hand up to shade his eyes from the sun, who was absently twirling a stick between the fingers of the other, stood like somebody who had learned to be easy in his own skin.

“Did you say something?” Rose’s voice drifted into Rey’s thoughts.

“Hmm? Oh.” Rey turned. Rose was hanging her dress up in the tiny closet space. The wedding’s predominant accent was orange, and so Rose and Rey had both chosen dresses which were the rich, juicy colour of pumpkins. “No.” Something stilled the truth on her tongue. “No, nothing important.”

When she turned back to the window, Ben had gone. The sound of the back door and the screen swinging shut echoed up through the house, and the murmur of voices followed, punctuated by Bibi. The depth of Rey’s gaze narrowed and she saw her own face in the glass. She was suddenly aware of the wrinkles in her clothes, of the layer of grime on her skin from driving with the windows down.

“I’m just…”

Rey gestured vaguely.

“Okay.” Rose didn’t look up from her suitcase.

The bathroom was on the next floor down, at the other end of the hall. Rey ran the tap and splashed her face with cold water. When she looked in the mirror above the basin her skin was shining with little beads of moisture, rolling down her forehead and off the end of her nose and chin. She wasn't wearing enough make-up for it to run. Plain tee, plain jeans, plain face. Would she look different to Ben, too? She closed the thought down, pinched it until it was small and insignificant. They were, she reminded herself, no longer important enough to each other for that to matter.

She found a towel and scrubbed her face dry, left the bathroom and shut the door quietly behind her; but she’d barely taken a step before she heard Bibi’s paws from below, _click-clacking_ up the wooden stairs. His ears appeared first, stood to attention, and then his funny little face with the tongue lolling out, clearly caught on her scent as he bounded up as fast as his little legs would carry him. He bowled straight for her, _yap-yap’ing,_ front paws jumping a few inches in the air.

Rey knelt down on one knee to pet him, smoothing her hand over the thick orange fur of his head, scratching behind his ears. His breathing settled into a contented _pant-pant-pant_ and he parked his not inconsiderable weight atop one of her sneakers.

“Hi, Bibi,” she murmured. “I missed you.”

“I think he missed you too.”

Rey tried not to jump, with limited success. Ben stood about ten steps down, staring up at them. Now that he was closer she realised there were a few grey hairs at his temple, and she _felt_ it in the tips of her fingers, in the unexpected jelliness of her knees.

“He probably caught your scent,” Ben added.

“Yeah. I was just thinking that.”

A silence descended, overlaid by Bibi’s contented breathing and the chatter echoing up the stairs. Somewhere a clock was ticking, and she wondered if it was the watch on Ben’s wrist; if it was still the Rolex his parents had given him for his twenty-first, long before she'd known him. More than once Rey had lain in bed while Ben was sleeping and picked it off the nightstand, reading the inscription on the back. _To Ben, with all our love, Mom & Dad. _

Slowly, Ben ascended the stairs about halfway, but stopped there, leaning on the rail. He was so tall that it put them roughly at eye-level.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

She was sure, now, that it _was_ the shirt she'd bought in Bushwick; she could see the small black label on the breast pocket that, had she been closer, would clearly say _Woolrich._ His sleeves were rolled up, exposing his forearms, and there was a fading summer tan against the red plaid. Without permission, she remembered sun-salty days on Coney Island, telling Ben to wear more sunscreen; remembered the press of those arms against her—

She cleared her throat and turned her attention back to Bibi, trailing her fingers back and forth in the groove above his whiskered eyebrows. Bibi pushed his face up into her hand, wet nose poking at her palm.

“Your mum said you took him for a walk.”

“Yes. We were both getting in the way.” That silence, again. “Anyway, I was just—” He pointed behind her. “Can I…?”

He waved his hand, miming the motion of passing her in the hallway.

“Oh. Sure.” Rey pushed at Bibi, palms squashing up against his rotund little body to shove him off her trapped sneaker. “Come on, dog, up you get.”

Bibi looked up at her with those big, dark, puppy-dog eyes and let out a whine. In the corner of her vision she could see Ben… _smiling?_

“Oh, don’t even try it, Bibi.” She gently grasped his hindquarters and physically maneuvered him off her shoe. “Ben wants to get past us.”

She realised, in the act of saying it, in the motion of rising to her feet, that it was the first time she’d said Ben’s name within his own earshot for—well, for a long time.

If he had been smiling, now it was gone, replaced with something she didn’t know how to read. He'd always had those; still, flat looks she couldn’t decipher. They’d frustrated her then; now it felt like the only thing about Ben that she recognised.

“Well.” She slid her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. “I'll—see you later, then.”

Ben nodded—once, staccato—and bounded up the rest of the steps and past her with his gaze ahead. She turned, just a little, to watch him out of the corner of her eye, enough to see that he was opening the door to the bedroom at the far end; the one directly underneath the little attic room.

Her heart did that odd flip again, the one she was trying to ignore. When she’d woken in the city this morning, stretching in her bed like a cat and listening to Rose make coffee in their tiny kitchen, Rey had been adherent to the break she'd enforced between them; the one which was clean and sharp and had let her get on with her life for the last two years. What she hadn't imagined was the reality of sleeping two yards away from him, separated only by a few layers of floorboard and wooden beam.

The stairs creaked as the house settled, and it broke her reverie. Even if Ben wasn’t about to come crashing back onto the landing and tell her all the things she hadn’t let him say back then, she didn’t want to wait around for—god, what, Ben in a towel, ready to take a shower?—for whatever might happen next, and so she crossed the landing in quick, anxious steps, trying not to breathe as she went.

* * *

By the time they’d unpacked, the second batch of tamales had come out of the oven. Kes placed one in Rey’s hands with an expectant eye and watched as she took a bite.

“What do you think? Better than those Spanish molletes, huh?”

He winked.

Rey nudged him with her elbow. “Be nice about my molletes. But honestly, Kes, these are delicious.”

They were. Rey was certain she could eat the rest of them, even if there were about a hundred cooling on the kitchen island.

The evening began to settle, drawing the sky inwards with reds and oranges, and Rey found everyone naturally collecting in the lounge, like rainwater in a basin—except for Ben, who, like a ghost, was present through his absence—and she settled herself on the floor, back against the couch, Finn’s knee at her shoulder.

“Okay, people, we’re watching _Singin’ in the Rain,_ ” Poe decreed with the authority of the person who owned the Netflix account. The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer theme roared through the television speakers.

“You okay down there?” Finn murmured as he handed Rey another wooden peg.

They were making table placements on a budget, and she double-checked the names she was supposed to be writing on the pegs, her uncapped fine-point marker hovering over the wood. She began to write an _L_ in her best approximation of flowing cursive.

“You know I like being on the floor,” she said. It was true. Rey had learned young that sometimes it was the only comfortable place you could find, and the habit had stuck.

The movie played on, supplemented by the ebb and flow of soft conversation. Finn and Rose were scrawling names on pegs too; though Finn had grown distracted by Debbie Reynolds bursting out of a cake, and was nodding along to the music. Kes and Poe picked gathered leaves from a large garbage bag, an absurd image that only made sense once Rey realised they were making confetti, punching holes in them with little star-shaped cutters and trying to stop Bibi from eating them; and Leia was at the table to the side of the room, pulling petals from fake fabric tulips, glancing at the television over the top of her glasses.

Rey followed the _L_ with an _A, N, D, O._ She concentrated on the exit stroke—that’s what it was called, wasn’t it?—and went back to add a flourish to the head serif—was it the head serif?—of the _N._

Exit stroke. Head serif. Ben had taught her those.

She thought of the calligraphy set he kept ( _had_ kept, for all she knew it could be gone now) on his desk; or rather, desks, plural—there’d been more than enough room for two of them in his Tribeca apartment ( _are you joking?_ she’d asked the first time he’d told her where he lived, and he’d shrugged, nonplussed, and said _old money_ ). The desk set against the giant loft windows had been black jamocha wood, expensive and barely ever used, because Ben had a habit of spreading his paperwork across the couches and the floor instead. Mostly they’d just fucked on it.

The other desk, though; that was old, a handcrafted piece of walnut wood placed under the window in Ben’s bedroom. It was covered with ornate scrollwork and inlaid mother-of-pearl, where scenes of Venice and the initials _P.A.N._ had been hand-etched.

 _It was my grandmother’s,_ was all Ben had said when she’d asked; but he’d let her keep papers and pencils there for when she wanted to draw.

The memory made his absence stark, because Ben—with all those deft pen strokes, and his ability to tear letters down into their constituent parts—should have been doing this too; and yet. He was alone in the house somewhere, and Rey was pretending he didn’t exist.

Something flared inside her—embers of long-ago things she refused to acknowledge—and she realised she’d pressed the pen down so hard the ink was bleeding through the wood, blotting out the cursive.

“Fuck,” she muttered.

Finn leant over her from the couch. “All good?”

“Yeah, I just—” She showed him the ruined peg. “Not concentrating.”

As they worked, Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds slowly fell in love on the television, and though Rey wasn’t quite listening it was a pleasant sound, cycling between song and speech. She counted the music off in her head; _Fit as a Fiddle, All I Do Is Dream of You, Make 'Em Laugh._ How many times had she seen this film, flicking through the television on Sunday afternoons? Sometimes it felt like the schedulers at the BBC had been the most consistent part of her childhood.

Perhaps, with her concentration so fully fixed on what she could hear, that was why she caught the noise. It wasn’t much, just the creak of the stairs, of the floorboards in the hallway; but it was enough to turn her head, to see the flash of red as it went by the door.

Her hand stilled. She thought about it. Then:

“I’ll be back in a sec,” she murmured to Finn, unwinding her legs and standing.

He nodded without really looking, eyes fixed on the film, a peg half-finished in his lap. Rey patted his shoulder and tip-toed out.

When she pushed the screen door open and stepped onto the veranda, darkness had swallowed the landscape; now only the final lilac edges of twilight were colouring the sky, silhouetting the mountains against the day’s final drawn breath.

The breeze pulled her hair, demanding attention. It was cool out, with more of a bite than the city, and so Rey wrapped herself in her own arms and hunched her shoulders. Somewhere an owl called to its partner, and earned a reply.

Ben was further down the veranda, working on the gerberas twisted into the railings. He was clearly picking up where someone—he?—had left off, bathed in dim ambience from the fairy lights strung across roof. The effect was dreamlike, as though Rey could wake up tomorrow and—just like everything else—pretend that this had never happened.

She headed for him. Ben didn’t look up, but she could see the tension in his neck and jaw, telling her he knew she was there.

She settled down beside him, crossed her legs, and handed him the next gerbera.

“It’s late,” she said.

“This will take a while.” Ben corkscrewed the wire stem of the flower around the railing. “I’m making progress while I can.”

“It looks good.”

“Sure. Doesn’t mean it’s not a pain in the ass.”

He held out his hand. Rey placed another flower in his palm.

“It’s nice of you, to help them out.” She meant it. “You’re just here for your mum, so—”

Ben frowned, sharply, and looked up. “Of course I’m not just here for my mom.”

“Right.” Rey blinked, whiplashed. “Of course.”

He turned back to the task at hand, still frowning. She forgot, sometimes, that Ben and Poe were bonded by childhood, even if they didn’t always seem to like it; that Ben’s claim to Poe’s affection superseded hers.

Ben, who had been the final falling domino in the ties that bound them all together; Rey had found Finn, who had found Rose, who had brought Poe, who had brought Ben, who had loved Rey. When she had loved him back, they’d all formed a perfect circle.

She picked at a splinter in the veranda floorboards. “Sorry.”

“Shit,” Ben muttered, fumbling and dropping the flower. For a moment he was stuck in _tableau,_ hand outstretched to pick it up; but then he drew back and ran his fingers through his hair instead.

He closed his eyes. “It's fine. You’re right. I wasn’t really invited. Not properly.”

Unbidden, old words rattled around Rey’s skull, shaped by Ben’s spitting anger. _You take everything from me, do you know that?_  

“That doesn’t mean you should hide away.” _From me,_ some part of her opined, but she crushed it until it was small and buried.

“Maybe.” Ben sighed. “But then I saw you and—”

When she glanced up he’d opened his eyes, and was looking at her.

“It’s okay,” she began. Anxiety threaded itself into her skin. “We don’t have to talk about—” _this, us._

He cut her off with the shake of his head. “No. I—Rey. Please.”

She dug more forcefully at the veranda floor; watched herself peel a strip of it away under her nails. The wood beneath the paint-washed surface was dark, the contrast deepened by the fairylights. Somewhere inside, Gene Kelly’s voice rang out _—for I'm content the angels must have sent you, and they meant you just for me—_ and it drifted through the gap beneath the back door.

“I had these grand plans,” Ben was saying, “to get through the weekend like a real grown-up. But then you were _there_ and it just—threw me. So I ran. Like I said. Real grown-up stuff.”

The more he spoke, the more it felt to Rey like he was speaking from far away, even though he was right next to her; as though it was the owls in the trees, and the breeze, and the splintering wood that had become loud in her ears, and Ben was lost underneath them.

Perhaps he’d noticed. She could sense his gaze on her; could almost feel the little sigh as it ghosted out of him and into the night.

“My therapist told me to be more honest,” he said.

Now Rey looked up. “Oh.”

 _Perhaps you and Ben should talk to somebody,_ Leia had said. _I know some people who could help you._ They’d ignored her.

“My Dad died and my girlfriend left me,” Ben said, and Rey winced. “That radically changes your perspective on therapy.”

Silence followed, and Rey rolled her own words around in her mouth, unsure of what they would be until she said, “Well. It’s good that you managed to talk to somebody. So. I’m proud of you. If that means anything.”

Ben nodded, slowly.

“Yeah. Yeah, that means something.”

She noticed again the few single threads of grey at his temple. It was a tangible measure that time had passed, that change had been wrought, and it made her stomach lurch; though not, for the first time all day, unpleasantly. It felt like—like the first time she’d ever seen him.

“And you. Are you—” he began.

“Fine, I’m fine,” Rey cut across, smiling tightly. “Really good.”

He wore that elusive look again, and she couldn’t be sure if he was waiting for her to say more. His gaze skipped around her face—mouth, eyes, ears, hairline—and somehow, in a look she’d known a thousand times over, Rey realised again how _different_ he seemed.

His eyes fell back to her mouth. Rey’s breath hitched, caught in her lungs, and there it was; a memory, piercing through with virulent clarity, of how _warm_ his skin had always been.

Somebody’s laughter drifted from an open window, and it broke the spell of _Ben’s eyes_ and _Ben’s mouth_ and the sense memory of his skin on hers.

He turned away, and Rey did the same, looking out to the mountains beyond. The lilac had bled away now, leaving the night in its place, and the stars pin-pricked through, brighter than Rey had seen them in years, because out here there was no light pollution.

“I’ll help with this,” she said, cutting through the quiet. “Two heads are better than one. Or two hands.” She held hers up, then looked at Ben’s. “Four hands.”

An inscrutable moment where Ben did nothing to respond; and then:

“Yeah.” He held out his hand again. Rey placed another flower in his palm. “Yeah, okay.”

* * *

They worked in a silence which became easier, and Rey ignored the sense of _second nature,_ of working around another person in the same way they had when it was moving around the kitchen on a weekday morning; except instead of cups of coffee, now they were making someone else’s wedding decorations.

Ben leaned back and yawned, stretched his arms out over his head. The Bushwick shirt rucked up to expose a thin strip of skin.

“I’ll do the rest tomorrow,” he said.

“We made good progress, though.”

That was true. Now the flowers covered a good two-thirds of the railing.

Silence again, and Ben stood. Rey did the same before he could offer to help her up.

Inside the house had darkened. Rey peered into the lounge, but it was empty, lit only by the freeze-framed end of _Singin’ in the Rain_ , dimmed behind a Netflix message that said _are you still watching?_ Everyone had gone to bed, and when she checked her phone Rey saw it was almost midnight.

Ben followed Rey up the stairs, a foot or so apart from her, and she had the distinct impression that he was deliberately slow, keeping up with her pace. They’d raced up the stairs of her old apartment building in Williamsburg once, laughing as she tried to take two steps at a time. Ben had still beaten her to the front door.

They reached the end of the hallway, and Rey’s little set of stairs.

“Well,” she said. “This is me.”

Ben leaned against the door of his own bedroom and nodded. She knew they'd done this once before too; had said their first goodnight a long time ago, in a different place. Ben had kissed her then.

“Thanks,” he said. “For helping.”

“S’okay, I didn’t mind.”

Rey put one foot on the bottom rung of the stairs.

“Rey?”

She paused. “Yes, Ben?”

He gripped the bedroom door handle and started to turn it; though it was slow, his back against the door as it began to inch away from the frame.

“Can we try to be friends? Only—it’s going to be a long weekend.”

 _Friends._ It was such a little word for something that could hurt so much.

“Of course.” She scuffed her shoe against the bottom step; took another up the little stairs. “Night, Ben.”

He pushed the door open the whole way, stepped backwards over the threshold. The room beyond was dark. His eyes were, too.

“Goodnight, Rey.”

He disappeared and shut the door. Rey didn't move immediately; stood instead on the second step, looking at the closed door and turning the sound of her name over and over. Her name in Ben’s voice had followed so many things. _Let's get out of here. Move in with me. I love you. I hate you._

Upstairs in their bedroom, Rose was asleep, and Rey swapped her clothes out for the oversized t-shirt she slept in, crept into her bed as quietly as she could.

Rose turned over and murmured, eyes still closed, “You disappeared. You okay?”

Rey stilled, covers pulled halfway over her.

“Oh, I was outside, that's all.” She leaned back into the pillows and stared at the skylight. From the bed, an angled strip of night was visible through the glass. “I just wanted to look at the stars.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find the tumblr masterpost for this fic [here](XXX) (featuring a _stunning_ moodboard by [rebelrebelreylo](http://rebelrebelreylo.tumblr.com/)).
> 
> The Spotify playlist for this chapter is [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/mvpud6xluc7nn7ptf5txklw4p/playlist/3B68w0MxJI3zZf7l30oc1G?si=X4pixCO5QDi5PZbLD7KWig).
> 
> The iOS messages were coded using [this tutorial](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6434845/chapters/14729722). The page dividers were coded using [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35610251/style-hr-with-image) as a guide.


	2. Friday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your support, be it kudos, bookmarks, and/or comments on the first chapter! I really appreciate how you've embraced this story.
> 
> Now, let's see if Rey will get on with it and embrace Ben... 
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://sciosophia.tumblr.com) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/sciosophia) if you'd like to say hi.
> 
> Thank you again to [RebelRebel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RebelRebel/pseuds/RebelRebel) for being a wonderful, encouraging beta, and to [thoseindarkness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thoseindarkness/pseuds/thoseindarkness) for checking my Spanish <3  
>  
> 
> .

 

_Friday._

“Okay. Eggs, bacon, bacon, tofu scramble, eggs _and_ bacon, eggs. Yes?”

Everyone nodded. They were slow with sleep, slouched around the kitchen island; except for Ben, leaning in the doorway, and Finn, who hovered at Rey’s shoulder with nervous, sleepy energy. The clock on the wall chimed an early hour.

She pointed her spatula at Poe. “And you want everything under the sun.”

He was slouched across the island, head on his arms, and when he nodded his cheek brushed against his skin.

Rey turned back to the stovetop, lifted the corner of a roll to check how it was browning, and found there were neatly toasted lines across it. Beneath her feet Bibi trotted about, tongue lolling, making happy little pants in the expectation that he was included in breakfast.

“Do you want any help?” Finn asked. He leaned around her to look at the skillets.

“No. Sit down and eat.” She swapped out utensils and poked at the tofu scramble.

“Let her spoil you if she wants to.” Kes leaned back on the bar stool and ran his hand through his hair, and it was so reminiscent of his son that Rey had to blink the overlaid image away.

She’d lined the plates up along the counter, and now she laid out the toasted bread and stacked the food on top; tofu scramble for Rose, and then eggs and bacon for the others. She set down the spatula and moved two over to the island, sliding them across to Kes and Poe _—_ _here you go_ _—_ and returned for the others.

She felt the warmth of a body at her shoulder, and said, without turning, “Finn, I’m fine.”

“I can take those,” Ben said.

She gripped the edge of a plate, trying not to jump. His voice was low, dark with sleep, and when she turned the dawn was slanting over his face, picking out the undertones of hazel in his eyes, turning the circles around his irises a deep, dark green. He gathered two of the plates, wordlessly balanced a third across his wrist and the heel of his palm, and gave them to his mother, Rose and Finn.

Rey stared at his back, watching his muscles shift under his t-shirt, enough for her to bite her lip and then hope nobody had seen. She took the last two plates—hers and Ben’s—and set them at opposite ends of the island. The echoes of last night imprinted on her again like half-remembered dreams, just as they’d promised to. _Can we be friends?_

The sun was climbing over the mountains as they filed outside after breakfast, and Rey stood on the grass and shaded her eyes with her hand, the way Ben had done yesterday. Poe, in marshalling them, sounded every inch the Lieutenant Colonel, and as seconds-in-command he had two retired Generals; his father, and Leia. Rey supposed that, if you were going to plan and build an entire wedding on your own, with no professional help, then three members of the Air Force and your sort-of Aunt Qira’s summer house in the Hudson Highlands would come in handy.

Personally, Rey hoped that she never, ever had to plan a wedding of her own. She would elope or she would wait in line at City Hall, or never marry at all.

“And Rey,” Poe said, at the end of his instructions. “Can you roll out the dancefloor on your own, or…?”

 _The dancefloor_ was a huge Persian rug they’d found on eBay. It was propped against the back steps now, a fabric cylinder standing twenty feet into the sky, bound up with Poe’s old rock climbing ropes and carabineers.

“I’ll help her,” Kes said.

Poe frowned. “You sure, Dad?”

“I can do it—” Rey began, but Kes shook his head.

“I’m old, not dead,” he told Poe; and then, turning to her: “It’s not that I don’t think you can do it alone; it’ll just be easier with two of us.”

The rug was heavy, thick cloth weighted with quality, and they hefted it over to the wide open space of the lawn. A little ways over, Rose and Finn and Leia arranged a set of rectangular wooden tables into one long one and paired it with chairs. Poe and Ben were untangling strings of little round bulbs, lights to be hung about the garden and in the trees.

The weather was on the warm side of balmy, and the exertion made Rey sweat. She stood back from the half-rolled-out rug and wiped her arm against her forehead, and in the pause she took in the sight of Ben, who had climbed up one of the trees on the lawn, and Poe below, feeding up a string of lights. They’d wrapped the lights around the trunk, and now, perched at the crux where trunk met boughs, Ben was threading them through the branches, face a picture of frowning concentration.

Gradually, Rey became aware that Kes was watching her as she watched Ben. There was a frown furrowed between his brows, and Rey shifted, smiled tightly to try and cut through it as she bent back to their work.

They rolled the rug out flat against the grass—it had a faint, musty scent that was already mixing with the smell of fall in the air—and next they weighed it down at the edges with chunks of firewood from the barn, and with old lamps and jars that they filled with electric tea lights.

“Oh, this one’s broken,” Rey said, holding a jar up to the light. The sunshine flared inside the fissure, and she turned the jar first one way and then the other, watching the sun ripple through it.

A large, dark shape blurred across the glass, and Rey looked past it to see Ben, a looming presence in his black t-shirt and black jeans, loitering at the edge of the rug. He was holding a bottle of water. It looked fresh from the fridge, and when he lifted it to his mouth Rey saw a light sheen of sweat on his skin.

“You done with those lights?” Kes asked him from over Rey’s shoulder.

“Nowhere near.” Ben took a sip. “You?”

He was asking Kes, but looking at Rey.

“Nearly,” Kes said. “Fake candles are fiddly.”

Rey looked down and ran her thumb along the cracked jar. She could see the pattern of the rug through the glass, warped by its curve.

She felt Ben step back. “Well. I should get back.”

Kes was closer, and louder. “Yeah. Have fun with the lights.”

He stood in her peripheral vision and they both watched Ben walk away.

“He’s trying,” Kes said when Ben was out of earshot.

It stilled her, like run-down clockwork. Perhaps Kes realised, because when he spoke again it was softer; more of a conspiracy between them.

“Look, I know you two haven’t talked. Sólo dios sabe por qué, but you haven’t, for whatever reason.” He ran his hand through his hair again. “And, well, I’m not your father—” which hurt, dully, “—and even then I couldn’t tell you what to do, but I’ve known Ben his whole life. And I know things were bad, but he’s worked hard since, well, _since_ _—_ and I promise, he is _trying_ _._ ”

The hurt stopped being dull and took on a sharpness under her ribs. It wasn’t disappointment in Kes’s voice, not exactly, but it burned like it. The backs of Rey’s eyes felt hot, and she blinked.

“Hey, hey.” Kes cloaked her shoulders with his arm and drew her in. “Sorry, kid, I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

Rey shook her head _—_ _I’m not crying_ _,_ which was technically true, because nothing had fallen—but, for the briefest moment, she let herself hide in the shoulder of his shirt. It was soft cotton, vaguely spiced with the scent of his cooking and his aftershave.

“I’m okay,” she said, muffled by the fabric.

Kes squeezed her shoulder. “I know it still hurts. I just wanna be sure you don’t end up hurting yourself more.”

He let go, gently, and raised his eyebrow. _Okay?_

She nodded, because what else could she say?

But there was enough to do that she could throw herself into it, even with all their words ringing in her head _(_ _C_ _an we be friends? He’s trying_ _)_ _._ They had to arrange flowers; fold napkins; pin up the table arrangements. By mid-morning it was time to go inside and help Leia and Finn with the wedding cake _(_ _not_ honey, thank god; instead it was Finn’s grandmother’s recipe, one of the only things she’d left him), and it was therapeutic, to break the eggs and mix the flour, the evaporated milk, to stir in the browning and butterscotch and vanilla. Rey could beat her own thoughts away inside the bowl.

The hours made work for hands that were never idle. By midday she was standing on the veranda with Finn, looking out at the garden again; except now it was a wonderland. It felt like hundreds of thousands of lights had been strung, so that they wrapped around the trunk of every tree, of every branch. Larger lights, proper bulbs with glowing filaments, hung from tree to tree, and there were glass vases, crammed with flowers and lights that looked like fireflies, all dotted along the tablecloth. Further down, nearer to the edge of the woods, there was a bower of twining wood and two neat squares of chairs set out in rows. In the middle, they'd made an aisle from the petals Leia had stripped off the fabric flowers. It was—

“Wow.”

When Rey turned to Finn he was biting his lip as it curved up, like he was trying to control his smile.

“Yeah,” he said, pausing as though to take it all in. The smile broke through. “Yeah.”

She leaned her head on his shoulder. She could feel him lean in too, resting his cheek on her hair, and he uncrossed his arms to twine them around her.

“I'm so fucking happy for you,” she said fiercely.

“Good.” She could feel Finn’s smile against her hair. “Because I'm so fucking happy.”

* * *

“I still don't like this game.”

Poe sighed dramatically. He drew another card from a pile _—_ _the stock_ _—_ and rolled his eyes.

“How can you not like _Rummy_ _?_ ”

“Because it’s an inferior version of _Chinchón._ ” Rey looked at her cards. “Besides, you always make me play it like a drinking game and I get a hangover.”

It wasn’t a drinking game now, in this lunchtime lull, but they’d still allowed themselves a glass of wine each; except for Ben, who’d shaken his head when the bottle was passing around. They’d dressed every part of the house, laid out and decorated the wedding table, hung the lights, and a million other things. She and Leia and Finn had finished icing the cake, leaving it to chill for fifteen minutes so that the frosting would dry before it went in the fridge. Now they were all at the table on the veranda, picking at plates of cheese and bread and cold meats in the sun.

Rey flicked her gaze up. Ben was at the other end of the table, and the necessity of hiding her cards from the others put him in her direct eye line. He wasn’t playing; instead, he was reading a copy of the Harvard Law Bulletin.

“Aha! Rummy!” Rose cried, just as there was a crash from the kitchen.

They whipped their heads around to the noise as one. Rose’s hand was still in the air, cards raised in triumph, now frozen by calamity. A moment of quiet—and then Bibi trotted out of the back door. His fur was oddly...matted? And covered in some weird—

“Is that _cake_ _?_ ”

Poe’s voice pitched high at the end of the sentence, and he scrambled from his chair, almost tripping in the process. Bibi seemed to think it was a game and bounced around his feet. When Poe picked him up, cake—because that’s what it was—smeared off the dog’s fur and onto his arms.

Wordlessly, slowly, everyone got up and trailed through the back door into the kitchen. There, on the floor, _smushed_ into the kitchen tiles by tell-tale paw prints, was the wedding cake.

“So,” Finn said into the silence. “I guess we need to make another one.”

“We can’t.” Rey’s voice sounded flat and far away to her own ears. “We used all the butterscotch. And most of the flour. And I used the extra eggs for breakfast.”

Everyone stared at the mess. It smelled of vanilla and faint hints of brandy.

“I can drive to the store.” It was Ben, leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed. “Assuming I’m the only person here who hasn’t had a drink.”

“No, no.” Poe sounded dazed. “Don’t worry about it, man.” He shook his head, Bibi still clutched in his arms. The dog was twisting about to try and lick bits of cake from his own fur. “Seriously, it’s not—we’ll just—”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Ben interrupted. “It’s a thirty-minute drive.” His voice softened a little. “I don’t mind.”

Poe didn’t immediately reply; instead, he turned to Finn, who looked at the cake, at Bibi, at Ben, and then finally to Leia, who seemed to wordlessly understand why.

“It’s fine, Finn, I can easily make another one.” She stepped around the emergency zone and over to the cake tins drying in the wash rack. “Besides.” She nodded to Bibi, who was whining now, clutched by Poe so tightly that he couldn’t twist to reach the matted cake on his rump. “It was clearly a good cake. We can’t take that away from the people.” Then, to Ben: “You know what to get?”

Before he could reply—

“I’ll go.” The words were circling in Rey’s head. _Can we be friends? He’s trying. Don’t end up hurting yourself._ “I’ll go, I know what we need.”

She shrugged to try and make it casual, as though it wasn’t weighted down with a history they all knew and were failing to mention. Rose’s expression was set, eyebrows fractionally raised, the look she used when she was assessing a situation which had surprised her, and Finn was frowning. Leia was doing that _face_ _,_ the knowing one—and Poe, thank god, was still distracted by the dog.

Kes, she thought, had a slight smile.

Rey ignored it all and turned to Ben. Right now, his was the look she cared about.

It turned out to be a rigid set to his mouth and the rhythmic tick of a muscle under his eye, the one that had a million meanings; and Rey, so long unpractised, so unprepared for this new version of Ben, didn’t know how to read it.

“Shall we go?” she asked. It came out prim and stiff, and she cleared her throat.

“Sure.” Ben pushed his shoulder off from the doorframe and stood. “I’ll get my keys.”

Rey grabbed her wallet from upstairs, and by the time she was shutting the screen door, he was waiting in the car. As she slid into the passenger seat Ben fiddled with his cell phone, and he didn’t look at her as she snapped her seatbelt buckle in; just pushed his hair out of his eyes and set the phone down between them, grasping the steering wheel and starting the ignition. Everything felt frail, boxed into a space that was small enough to hold their memories close, to whisper old words in their ears. Old pleasures; old pains.

“My mom could have just given me the recipe,” Ben said when they were out on the road.

“I know.” She thought of Kes, of the heavy weight of the Persian rug. “But it’ll be easier with two of us.”

The indicator started ticking, and Ben slowed the car down and swung left. There was silence for half a mile, and then:

“I heard you finished school.”

It hadn’t occurred to Rey that Ben would know. “Oh. Yes. After—” _after we tore each other to pieces_ “—I had that scholarship come through, the one I—well, I guess you remember—so I quit Maz’s and lived in the lab for a year. I passed my viva last November. Minor corrections.”

Ben tapped the steering wheel with his fingers. “I didn’t say it then, so. I’ll say it now. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

Another car drove by. Ben glanced over at Rey, then back to the road. He cleared his throat.

“I should have been there. I’m sorry.”

Rey faltered and fumbled with her wallet, dropping it into the footwell.

“Shit,” she muttered, bending in half to retrieve it. It was awkward, her shoulder cramped up against the glove box, and she ran her fingers around until they left the car’s smooth carpet and hit cheap faux leather instead.

She sat back, wallet clutched in her lap, and picked at the stitching with her nail.

“It’s okay. Things happen.”

Her voice bled into the silence that filled the car. When she looked up Ben was staring ahead, lips pressed together. She had the sudden urge to reach out and touch his arm, to rub soothing circles into his broad shoulders.

“I left my job,” he said.

If Rey had been driving, this would have been the moment she slammed hard on the breaks. As it was, she only turned to Ben with wide eyes and said, “What?”

“Yeah. After.” _After you left._ “It felt like—I don’t know. My life had an empty space and it threw things into relief. We had this meeting, Hux’s presentation—we were lobbying against this bill and we needed grassroots messaging, I remember that exactly—and in the middle I just stood up and told them I was done. That’s how I said it. _I’m done._ And then I took my things from my desk and I went home.”

He shrugged, as though it was nothing, but he gripped the steering wheel hard enough to whiten his knuckles.

Rey opened her mouth, closed it again. Buried feelings rose, a fear that tightened her throat, that made her grip the edges of the passenger seat. The First Order had been more than a job; had been a lifestyle, an outlook; a dark, insidious tendril warping Ben until he was his own shadow, until he could either save himself or drown them both. _Snoke’s just using you_ _,_ she’d said when she was angry; and then, when she was desperate: _please, Ben, please don’t go this way._

The last time, when she’d been half out of the door with a cardboard box full of books and a spare iPhone charger, she’d told him _I can’t do this for you_ _._ She’d waited in the doorway and looked back at him—because she was good at that, waiting—but he’d only watched wordlessly, arms crossed, face blank, until she’d resolved herself and shut the door.

Rey had managed not to cry until she was out on the sidewalk, gasping into cold fall air.

She flexed her fingers against her seat. _Are you happier without me?_ she wanted to ask, and it was on the edge of her tongue until she said, “That’s good, Ben. That’s really good.”

He glanced at her. “Thank you. It is.”

Rey looked away, back to the window. The road was descending out of the mountains, down toward the Hudson River, and the foliage was changing. The leaves were greener, closer to the river; closer to the summer just gone.

Ben smoothed the car around a bend in the road. “I assume you applied to GISS.”

She’d told him that the first night they’d met. _You’re doing a Ph.D.?_ he’d repeated back to her, with admiration that made her heart soar. _Yup, Applied Mathematics, and I’m focusing on engineering so I can work for GISS_ _—_ the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, she’d clarified at his look _—_ _and then maybe NASA for real, who knows._

 _So you want to look at the stars_ _?_ he’d asked.

 _Yes_ _,_ she’d said.

Now anxiety overwrote the fear in Rey’s throat. _The application deadline for Post-Doctoral Research Scientist (GISS) is quickly approaching. As of today, your application is incomplete._ She was losing count of how often she’d logged into the portal and then straight back out again.

“I’m actually teaching. Just undergrad stuff at Columbia, but I like being back at the faculty and it pays the bills, so.”

“Oh. I thought—did you change your mind?”

The road took a deeper, sharper dip. A bird flew from the canopy a little way off, and it was a silhouette against the perfect blue sky.

“No, no, I didn’t, there’s just—” The feeling had always been abstract; now it was forming into words on the tip of her tongue, and she huffed them out in one hurried breath. “There’s just something about putting yourself down on paper, that’s all. Writing your whole life out into an application form.”

“Rey.” Her name in his voice again. It sounded good, and her toes curled inside her shoes. “You are the bravest person I know. I find it hard to believe you’re letting an application form get the better of you.”

Her cheeks warmed _—_ _bravest_ _—_ and she hoped it didn’t show. “It just makes you feel—”

“Exposed.”

“Yes. Like I’m inviting judgement, which I am, really.” She swallowed. “It wants your _honours_ and _awards_ and _publications_ _,_ and every time I start, I worry that I won’t have—that I won’t be good enough.”

“You _know_ what that is, Rey.”

“Imposter syndrome, I know, I know.” They’d had this kind of conversation before, too.

“If they don’t choose you, they’re idiots.” His tone was final. “You’re passionate. You work hard. You're _so_ intelligent. Who else are they going to find?”

“Ben. There’ll be hundreds of us.”

“I mean it. How could there be anyone else but you?”

It stuttered her heartbeat, and she had a sudden, unplanned hope that he’d be looking at her; but when Rey turned Ben was still watching the road.

“Maybe,” she said softly. She turned back to the window again. “Maybe.”

* * *

When they came to it, the town had that classic New England kind of look, the one Rey still, even after a decade, found charming. The main street—named for its purpose—was lined with neat rows of two- and-three-storey red brick buildings, and their neatly arched windows and doors reminded Rey of the old Georgian townhouses in London.

The supermarket was in the middle, and they parked up in the lot out front. In the rearview mirror, Rey caught a guy staring at the car from the other side of the street. As they unbuckled and stepped onto the tarmac she looked at the trucks and saloon cars parked up beside them, and realised how much the Maserati stuck out.

“Okay,” she said when they were inside the store, hooking a plastic grocery basket into the crook of her arm. “Butterscotch. Eggs. Flour. Nutmeg.”

The store called itself a supermarket, but by New York City standards it was a convenience store. There were standing fans circling back and forth despite the fall temperatures, and every so often Rey would walk into one’s path and find it lifting her hair off her face. Ben was behind her, and when she turned she saw it was doing the same to him.

They trailed around the store, throwing items into the basket as they found them; and then other things they didn’t quite need; peanut butter and almonds and beef jerky (Ben) and microwave popcorn and Goldfish crackers and soda (Rey). It felt normal, to wonder wordlessly around a store and collect things in one basket. Rey half-expected Ben to touch the small of her back as she leaned over the freezer, looking at ice cream, or when she stopped to pick at a rack of cheap sunglasses; but he didn’t.

The checkout girl looked young, and when they reached the cash register she smiled at them with teeth that had braces on both rows.

“I’ll get this,” Ben said after she’d rung everything up. Rey began to protest, but he waved it away.

“Are you enjoying your vacation?” the girl asked brightly as Ben handed over $20.

“Oh. Sure.” He ran a hand through his hair and took a sudden, nervous interest in the cardboard sign hanging from the ceiling. It was advertising 3-for-2 offers on Pop Tarts.

There was a metallic _ding_ and the girl shut the cash register, handing Ben his change.

“We usually get couples coming through on long weekends.” She smiled at Rey. “Are you staying nearby?”

Rey’s face burned. “Skygazer Hill Lodge. But we’re here for a wedding, we’re not—”

She waved a hand between her and Ben. _Together._

The girl’s smile reformed into something that was half-surprise, half-frown. Her cheeks flushed. _At least all three of us are embarrassed_ _,_ Rey thought.

“Oh, sorry,” the girl flustered. “You just looked…”

She trailed off. Her face reflected the unique doubt of a person old enough to exist in the adult world but too inexperienced to navigate it.

Rey had plenty of practice in false joviality from years at Maz’s diner, and she adopted a fake smile of her own. “Don’t worry about it.”

The girl’s smile returned, and she waved as they headed for the door. “Thanks! Enjoy the wedding!”

The silence returned in the car, haunted by the checkout girl’s assumption, and so they sat in the parking lot and filled the Maserati with the noise of plastic packets—Ben’s almonds and Rey’s Goldfish. Rey turned her words to the checkout girl over and over. _We're not together._

 _Anymore_ had followed, unspoken.

On impulse, she held the Goldfish out to Ben, but he waved them away; instead offered the open packet of almonds. Rey shook her head.

Ben folded the packet up and leaned across to stash it in the glove compartment. It was set low in the car’s dashboard, and his arm was warm, barely a centimetre above Rey’s knee. The movement brought the faint hint of laundry detergent and the garden and dried sweat with it; the scent of their day’s hard work. Rey had the urge to lean into it, but she let Ben move his arm away without touching him, and she put the box of Goldfish back in the grocery bag.

Ben started the car, engine humming, and picked up his cell. As he did, the Bluetooth speakers kicked in. Something must have been set to autoplay, because he almost dropped the phone when music filled the car at a considerable volume.

“Are you listening to _Hamilton_?” Rey squeaked.

“No,” Ben said.

The car's speakers directly contradicted him.

“You _are_ listening to _Hamilton_.” Despite herself, she grinned.

“It’s catchy,” Ben muttered. He put the car into reverse and backed slowly out of the lot. Rey adjusted the volume, turning it higher. Ben winced.

“How long did I spend asking you to listen to this?”

“Long enough, clearly.”

Rey _laughed_. It felt like such a pure piece of unexpected _joy_ , to hear these notes _here_ , with Ben, in his car. The almonds, the Goldfish, the music. It was comfortable, suddenly, a new iteration of old things, and she turned the music up again before she said, “Not singing along?”

Ben shook his head. “Literally never.”

He glanced over at her for as long as the road would allow. Rey felt that unbidden flutter again, the one she was trying to ignore. _I look into your eyes and the sky's the limit_ , indeed.

Ben had said he wouldn’t sing, but as the music trailed toward its end she caught the timbre of his humming underneath, wordless notes to echo the lyrics; _in New York you can be a new man_.

The album shuffled into a loud ensemble chorus, but it had only lived for a few short notes before Ben’s phone rang and cut it off.

He frowned.

The phone was sat between them, and she could see the caller ID: _Kes_. The ringtone was jarring and insistent in the wake of the music it followed.

“I don’t mind if you want to take it,” she said.

Ben glanced at her and then took the call. “Is everything okay?”

“What? Yes, of course.” Kes’s tinny voice was too loud over the full-volume car speakers, and Rey rushed to turn them down. “I was just calling to ask if you can pick Kaydel up.”

Ben’s whole demeanour changed. He sat forward in his seat, hands gripping the wheel. Something heavy and unpleasant dropped into the pit of Rey’s stomach.

“ _Kay_ _?_ I thought she couldn't make it.”

“Yeah, well, apparently plans changed. She was going to surprise us but her car battery’s died a mile out and she had to call ahead. Can you swing by for her? Maybe try jump-starting the car?”

“Of course.”

“Great, thanks, kid.”

They said goodbye and cut the call. The music didn’t come back on, but Rey was glad for it. Kaydel’s name had sliced through the preceding moments, obscuring them like smoke; like they, too, had only been another dream.

* * *

Rey knew who Kaydel Co Connix was, but they’d never met, because Kaydel _—_ _Kay_ _—_ had spent the entirety of Rey and Ben’s relationship on the other side of the world; first in Perth and then travelling up to China and South Korea and Japan.

 _She never stays in one place for long_ _,_ Ben had said, shrugging like it didn’t matter to him. Rey had wanted to shake him and yell into his face. _She clearly means a lot to you. Just tell me about her. I can take it._

Now Kaydel was a small dot in the distance, becoming human as they drove closer. She was leaning against her car, but when they approached she looked up and waved, a large, tracing arc over her head, as though she were guiding a plane in to land.

Ben’s hands flexed on the steering wheel.

They parked up trunk-to-hood with Kaydel’s little silver Ford, and then Ben was undoing his seatbelt and jumping out before Rey could even start to think; so she watched in the rearview mirror as Ben wrapped Kaydel up and lifted her off the ground. She was laughing, and Ben’s laugh was there too, underneath it. The stone in Rey’s stomach dropped further.

Rey got out of the car and shut the passenger-side door. Ben was still holding Kaydel, but his eyes caught on Rey, and he set her gently down onto the tarmac.

He cleared his throat. “Rey, this is Kaydel. Kay, this is—”

“Rey. I guessed.”

She held out her hand and smiled. Rey shook it. Kaydel’s fingers were slim and warm.

“Thanks for bringing an aerospace engineer to fix my car,” she said to Ben. At Rey’s expression, she added, with the languid good nature of a happy cat, “It is aerospace, right?”

“It is.” Apparently, Ben’s censorship had only gone one way. “But I grew up with a mechanic, so that’s probably more useful. Do you have jump leads?”

“Is that the English way of saying jumper cables?”

"Uh huh."

"Then yes." Kaydel leaned into the open window of her car and grabbed them from the front seat.

Ben popped the trunk on the Maserati and exposed the battery. Rey neatly clipped the red lead and ran it along to the battery in Kaydel’s, exposed by the open hood; then the black one, teeth snapped around it on one end, the other around the metal strut holding up the hood. Rey had jumpstarted so many cars for Plutt that it was as mindless and easy as breathing.

“Okay, run the engine.”

Ben sat halfway into his driver’s seat, door still open, long legs stretched out on the tarmac, and gunned the ignition. Rey knew there was a Ferrari engine under the hood, and it purred; that deep, growling sound which always hit Rey in the chest. Some illicit part of her loved expensive cars, even if Ben’s Maserati could have paid her postgrad tuition for a year.

It only took one try to start Kaydel’s car, and she let out a cheer and clapped her hands.

“ _Thank_ you.” She clasped Rey’s arm. “I know this car is awful but it’s _my_ awful car, you know?”

Rey thought of the ugly little Nissan Micra she’d repurposed from Plutt’s garage. It had been small and unlovely, but it had been _hers_ _,_ rebuilt practically from the wheel arches upwards. She still missed it.

“Yeah, I do know.”

Kaydel let go of her arm. “Well, now you’ve saved my ass I guess we can join the party. Or rejoin, in your case.” She sat back in her car, engine running, though she didn’t close the door. Instead, she leaned forward and braced her arms on the window frame where the glass had been rolled all the way down. “I hear you guys have a cake to make? Because of—”

“Bibi,” they said in unison.

“Little monster,” Kaydel added. “God, I love that dog.”

Behind them, Ben cleared his throat. “Shall we go?”

He’d shut the trunk of the Maserati; now he was watching them with an odd look, like he was chewing the inside of his cheek.

“Absolutely.” Kaydel closed her car door, then leaned back through the open window. “Hey, has your mom made rugelach? Please tell me she’s made rugelach.”

Rey decided to wait in the Maserati, but even with the doors shut she could hear Kaydel’s laugh, could see Ben’s smile in the rearview mirror. A minute or two; then the driver’s side door cracked open like a whip, and Ben slid into the seat. He didn’t say anything as he shifted the car out of neutral, eyes on the reflection of Kaydel’s Ford edging out of its parking spot; but the smile began to fade. He glanced at Rey, and she noticed the tension radiating from his hands, wrapped tightly on the steering wheel.

“Ben?”

He twisted it, pulling into the road to follow behind.

“I’m fine.”

“You just seem—”

“I’m fine.” He inhaled sharply at his own tone. “Sorry,” he said immediately; and again, softer this time: “Really. I’m fine.”

 _I wish you’d tell me_ _,_ she wanted to say to him. _I wish you’d tell me what she is to you._ Because Rey wasn’t stupid. Kaydel’s absence had always been palpable. Ben had never talked about her. And yet.

“You know they’re really close, right?” Poe had said when she’d asked about it, right at the beginning. Poe had still been on crutches, halfway recovered from the bike accident, and Rey had brought him pizza from _Vinnie’s._

Rey had shaken her head.

“Oh.” Poe had set his slice of Parmageddon aside. “Well, they were joined at the hip as soon as she arrived—‘cause you know Kay was one of—”

“Luke’s foster kids, yeah, I know.”

“—and they just…honest to god, when we were growing up they were like twins; secret languages, sneaking off together, causing trouble—Kay, usually, but Ben always covered for her. They used to drive Leia and Luke mad.” Poe had frowned. “You really don’t know?”

Rey had tried to picture Ben’s childhood as anything other than the life he led now; proper and serious and sharp. Poe had sounded like he was describing a stranger.

 _I wish you’d tell me_ _,_ Rey thought now, watching Ben drive. _I wish, I wish, I wish._

But Ben didn’t tell her anything; only accelerated the car up to the speed limit.

* * *

It was quicker to make the cake the second time around, perhaps because now they could mix the eggs and flour and everything else together without the pressure of Poe’s wedding agenda in the back of their heads.

“Hey.” Finn hugged Rey, even as his clothes were covered in flour. “You okay?”

She nodded against his shoulder. “Uh-huh.”

Beyond the kitchen, there was the rich, multi-layered sound of Poe and Kaydel and Ben. It was punctured by a laugh—Kaydel’s, still unfamiliar—and they both turned their heads towards it instinctively.

“It’s okay,” Finn said into her hair. “I’m feeling left out too.”

Poe had mirrored Ben’s greeting, lifting Kaydel into a hug, though they were closer in height and so her Nikes hadn’t been quite so far off the floor. Now they’d huddled together in the lounge, whispering the kind of reminiscence only childhood friends could. It was an alien concept; neither Finn nor Rey had any childhood friends to speak of.

But—

“You’re assuming I’d rather be in there than in here.” Rey slung her arm around Finn’s waist and squeezed. “They’ve got their best friend, but I’ve got mine.”

With Leia’s help, they assembled the second attempt at the cake, a two-tiered version of what Finn’s grandmother had made on Sundays (before her grave, before foster care, before Rey). They smothered it in frosting, a little thinner than before, a little more of the cake showing through. This time, they didn’t leave the kitchen before they put it in the fridge.

“This is your fault,” Rey told the dog as she shut the kitchen door behind them. Bibi stretched where he was dozing on the hallway carpet, yawned, and got up to follow them.

Kes and Poe were pulling one of the smaller couches out into a bed. _The groom can’t see the groom before the wedding_ _,_ Poe had decreed, grinning. _You can take the bedroom._

“I mean, obviously Hobbiton was great,” Kaydel was saying, perched on the arm of another couch.

Finn went to help Poe with the bed, tucking the corners of the sheet in. Rey closed the blinds, working from window to window; but it got the better of her, the need to glance around for Ben’s reaction, her heart thumping. _Lord of the Rings_ was his thing; had been _their_ thing.

“It’s on this farm outside of Rotorua? The road in is weirdly industrial but when you get there it is _exactly_ what you’d imagine, all colourful and small.” She pointed at Ben. “You _need_ to go, someone has to take pictures of you standing next to everything.”

He smiled. Rey pushed down on the way it made her heart pulse.

“I’ll get around to it.”

He glanced at Rey as he said it. _We’ll go to New Zealand_ _,_ they’d promised each other on lazy Sundays, sprawled across the couch with the Battle of Helms Deep on Ben’s giant television. _I’ll take pictures of you in Hobbiton_ _,_ she’d said. _You’ll look like an Ent._

“Can you throw me those pillows?” Kes asked.

Ben stood, grabbing them from the couch.

“Actually, hold on,” he murmured, disappearing from the lounge.

Rey resisted the urge to follow. It was as though, after a long drought without him, her cells wanted to rehydrate, and she tried to shake it out of her head as she closed up the last blind.

“You know I went through London, on my way back?”

It was Kaydel, throwing her voice across the room to Rey. She slid off the arm of the couch and on to the cushions, patted the space beside her. Rey paused—and then trudged over, dropped herself into it. She pulled her knees up and curled her legs beneath her.

“Whereabouts?”

“I stayed in Vauxhall, there’s this hostel by the bus station—”

“Yeah, I know it.”

“—uh huh, really great for all the tourist stuff across the river. I could just walk or get the bus to a bunch of places.” She tilted her head. “Which bit of London are you from?”

Not _which bit of the UK?_ London. Kaydel’s knowledge of Rey was crystallising, an ever more obvious sign that Ben had outlined Rey to her as an entire person. Not the scraps that Rey had; of Kaydel as a blurred outline, dark with Ben’s past.

“Deptford.” A flat above Plutt’s garage, next to the railway line. Her windows had rattled when the trains went by. “It’s alright,” she added at Kaydel’s look. “No one ever knows where that is.”

She didn’t mention Islington, or Kilburn, or Tower Hamlets, or any of the other boroughs that had passed her around between them. _We can’t find someone to foster her long-term_ _,_ the social workers were always saying over the top of her head. _So we’ll have to do it out-of-area._

Wherever she went, kids had teased Rey for her accent, shaped by the Spanish she’d been speaking for six years, and so, in childish pain, she’d moulded it into something else; not their MLE, but closer to her mother’s voice, so oddly RP for a woman drinking herself to death in a tiny Almerían flat. Rey had watched a battered VHS copy of _Four Weddings and a Funeral_ over and over again, mouthing along with the dialogue. Long vowels, rounded _O_ s.

It was the sound of her mother. _Rey, sweetheart._

Kaydel’s gaze slid from Rey to the door, and her face crinkled into laughter. “What _are_ you doing?”

Ben stood in the doorway, clutching a blanket and pillow. The sleeves of his t-shirt had bunched up, exposing the muscles of his arms, and Rey darted her gaze away.

“But we don’t need spare bedding,” Kes said.

Ben shook his head. “I’m sleeping down here too.”

“Oh, don’t be dumb.” Kaydel stretched against the sofa cushions. “How many times have we shared a room, Ben Solo?”

Of course. Rey could imagine it, the way Ben would’ve told his mother not to worry, that she wouldn’t have to make room. It made sense, for two childhood friends to share, the way they must have done a million times before.

Rey felt sick.

Perhaps Ben was worried too, because he didn’t say anything for a moment; just readjusted his hold on the pillow and swallowed.

“Yeah, it’s not like she snores _that_ loudly,” Poe added, oblivious as he billowed his own blanket out over the makeshift bed.

Finn, though, had clearly caught it, and he raised his eyebrows at Rey from across the room. She shrugged against the sick in the pit of her stomach. _It’s nothing_ _,_ she mouthed.

When Rey turned back Ben was looking at her strangely, mouth pressed again into that flat, cheerless line. The muscle under his eye twitched, and she wondered if he’d seen her.

“Fine,” he said to Kaydel. “Fine. We’ll share.”

 _It is fine_ _,_ Rey told herself.

When it came time for bed, there was an unspoken agreement to shuffle out before Finn and Poe—who, when she glanced over her shoulder, were leaning into each other, ready to kiss goodnight—and Rey found herself alone with Ben and Kaydel on the top floor. Kes and Leia were in their rooms below and Rose was above, in bed already.

Ben was still holding the blanket and pillow as they reached his _—_ _their_ _—_ bedroom door. Kaydel flung it open and flipped the light on. It was the first time Rey had seen inside. It shared its style with the rest of the house, all pale floors and walls and paint-washed wood, but there was one bed—a double—and the window was a traditional gable. Kaydel’s bag had been slung into a corner on the opposite side of the bed to Ben’s. Both of them had unfolded their wedding clothes out over the comforter, Kaydel’s on one side and Ben’s on the other, like a matched pair. Rey found that she didn’t want to look.

Ben stood on the threshold, and Rey stilled at the foot of the stairs to her room. They both watched Kaydel tugging the pins out of her buns, unwinding them to run her fingers through her hair.

She turned and saw them both, smiled with a bobby pin between her lips. She strode back to the doorway and leaned around the frame, half-out, half-in.

“Rey—I liked meeting you,” she said around the bobby pin, and then took it out of her mouth. “I’m glad we got around to it.”

Her look to Ben was pointed.

She went back into the bedroom, bending down to look in her bag, and Ben shifted, filling the doorway.

“So. Big day tomorrow,” he said.

Rey nodded. “Big day.”

“See you in the morning?”

She paused, two steps up. Ben looked oddly hopeful, watching her from the door; but there was still that odd nausea swirling in her gut, and so she began to climb the stairs again.

“Yeah,” she said. “See you in the morning.”

She turned away before Ben could say goodnight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea for Bibi's cake destruction was borrowed from [this moment (at about 1:00)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pJseKX8xgc) in Brooklyn Nine Nine s5e22 (ah, those pesky, adorable corgis).
> 
> The tumblr moodboard for this fic is [here](https://sciosophia.tumblr.com/post/180490387150/stunning-moodboard-by-rebelrebelreylo-embersrey). 
> 
> The Spotify playlist for this chapter is [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/mvpud6xluc7nn7ptf5txklw4p/playlist/26G8tzOP0QrRTg3c8UvCRd?si=VgYf8FwyQTy1-FpRlguI3Q). 
> 
> The page dividers were coded using [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35610251/style-hr-with-image) as a guide.


	3. Saturday (i).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all. Not only is [RebelRebel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RebelRebel/pseuds/RebelRebel) the most wonderful beta; she commissioned [this beautiful _Embers_ fanart](http://rebelrebelreylo.tumblr.com/post/180704161583/happy-early-reylomas-i-commissioned-the-lovely) from [spiegatrixlestrange](https://spiegatrixlestrange.tumblr.com/). I am speechless—thank you both (yas queens). 
> 
> Thank you also to everyone who has bookmarked this fic, left kudos, commented, and/or rec'd it, both on tumblr and twitter. I see every one of you, and I appreciate it so much—and I've been keeping an eye on your Kaydel theories...
> 
> I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sciosophia) and [tumblr](http://sciosophia.tumblr.com) (for now) if you'd like to say hi.
> 
> FYI that there is brief discussion of a canon-compliant funeral in here: if you'd like to miss that, skip the paragraph between _“You can't—”_ and _"“I know, I know, it's bad form..."_.
> 
> .

 

_Saturday (i)._

It was fall in Dutchess County, and it was beautiful weather for a wedding.

They had an agreement, she and Rose, to take a groom each; and as the dawn came they dispersed, Rose to Poe and Rey to Finn, so that now she was standing in Finn's bedroom, looking at his suit hung up on the wardrobe door. Her dress was hung up beside it; another matched pair.

Finn had gone to brush his teeth, but on the way out he'd opened his window. Now the morning air rattled the frame, and Rey shivered, thought about closing it; but her hands stilled on the wood and she stared out, caught by the scenery. The trees dappled the lawn with early morning sunshine, cut-outs of light that illuminated the bower and the Persian rug and the aisle of petals. The mountains watched over it all, distant and dusted in fall colours.

Yes; it was a beautiful day for a wedding.

A knock, and the door hinges creaked; but when Rey turned it was Leia in the doorway, not Finn. She was already dressed, clothes and braids and jewellery all in place, all immaculate.

She advanced and sat on the corner of the bed. For a moment they were both silent.

“I thought,” Leia said, then, smoothing her palm across the coverlet, “I could do your hair.”

Rey felt something like mourning creep over her; a yearning pinch for something she’d once had, and didn’t anymore. _Rey, sweetheart, let’s put your hair up for this passport photo._

She nodded. “I'd like that.”

She sat down, back half-turned, and Leia’s fingers settled in her hair. It was still slightly wet from the shower, and the shoulders of Rey’s t-shirt were damp where the ends had drip-dried.

“Sorry there’s not much to work with.”

“It’s alright.” Leia combed it through with her fingers. “Ben’s was about this length when he was little.”

Rey’s heart picked up at the single syllable of Ben’s name. She half-turned again, gifting Leia with her profile.

”You braided Ben’s hair? When he was a kid?”

“Sometimes.” Leia was smiling. “For practice. Or for fun.”

She methodically sectioned Rey’s hair at the front, then split it further, into three, and began to braid. Her knuckles brushed softly against Rey’s cheek with the rhythm of it: _one, two, three; one, two, three_.

“I was never sure,” Leia said, voice neutral, “whether you stopped speaking to me because of Ben, or if _I_ _’d_ done something.”

“ _No_. No.” Rey wanted to shake her head; but it would ruin the braid, and so she only clenched her fingers and said, “No. You didn’t do anything.”

Leia hummed thoughtfully; and still her hands moved: _one, two, three; one, two, three._

“I wondered if that was the problem. Whether I _should_ have done more. For Ben. For both of you.”

"That's not fair—sorry." Rey _had_ shaken her head this time, jerking her hair out of Leia's hands; but Leia murmured gently— _it's alright_ —and gathered the ends together again. "That's not fair on you. It was our mess. It wasn't your responsibility."

Leia tucked the braid behind Rey's ear, underneath the rest of her hair, and fastened its loose tail into place. The bobby pins poked at Rey's skull.

"There."

She smiled, drawing strands free at Rey’s temple; then she folded Rey's hands into her own lap, caging their fingers together.

"The thing about being a mother," Leia began, lightly rubbing her thumb along Rey's knuckles, "is that you always feel you have a responsibility. I know," she cut across Rey's protest, "and I'm not making excuses for Ben, god knows that boy has been his own worst enemy, but—I should have let you know you could come to me, both of you, if you needed it. I should have been there more."

 _My mother should have been there more._ She'd heard it so many times from Ben, his voice soft in the dark as they opened their childhoods up to each other.

Leia patted Rey's hand one last time and let go. "That's the story of my relationship with my son, I'm afraid. I'm sorry for it all the same."

"But you're here now," Rey said.

"Yes."

"And Ben came with you."

Now Leia did smile. "Yes. That's true." Her eyes flickered over Rey's face, and there was something in them; a light that Rey had seen before. "Though I'm not sure he's here for me."

Rey's face grew hot, and she cleared her throat.

"Come," Leia said.

She stood and tugged Rey with her towards the wall mirror. Their reflections stared back; Leia small and regal in full-length green, Rey tall and spare and still in the baggy t-shirt she slept in.

She touched lightly at the braid. It swept across the crown of her head and down behind her ear; simple and pretty.

Leia tilted her head. "It's an Organa family tradition, braiding."

 _Family tradition_. The thought stirred ire in her gut, that old exasperation with Ben for pushing them away. What she'd have given to be able to trace her heritage like a map.

"Though I've always thought, if you grew out your hair, you'd look just like my mother. Padmé, I mean." _My real mother_ followed, unspoken. "I'm not one for spiritualism but I saw it as a sign you were meant to be with us."

The words were a switch; they ignited a need to belong that was _burning_ , a tight hot thread that wound out of Rey's earliest memories and into the sting behind her eyes.

She took Leia's hand and squeezed. "I'm sorry I stopped speaking to you. I just—"

"Don't apologise. I understood."Leia squeezed back. "My son isn't the only one who's done some thinking recently. I wasn't frank when I should have been, so I'll do it now. Rey, if you need me, _I will be there_. Any time. However long it's been. However this weekend ends. Hmm?"

Leia had raised her eyebrows in earnest. Everything swirled together in Rey's throat, threatening to choke her, and she swallowed, covered it with a laugh. "I can't cry before the wedding starts."

"No, that won't do." Leia rose up and pressed a kiss to Rey's cheek. "Alright. You look beautiful—but please, change out of this scrappy old t-shirt, I hated it enough when Ben was wearing it."

She smoothed its hem between her thumb and forefinger, eyeing it critically, and _of course_ she'd recognise it. Rey’s face flushed further. It was Ben’s old _Avenged Sevenfold_ t-shirt, so often borrowed that he’d said Rey could keep it; and she had. Through everything.

“Well.” Leia dropped the hem. “I should check on Kes. He's pretending to be calm, but—” _He's not._

She departed with a backwards wave; left Rey alone with her own reflection.

 _You look like my mother_. _Padmé._

Rey thought of the photographs in Ben’s apartment; not many—and that made sense for a man who was so keen to let the past die, or stay dead—just one of his parents, full of youth and love; and another, older, of a young woman in a checked shirt and jeans, riding a horse along a beach in bright sunshine. It had drawn Rey, always. The woman was beautiful, even more so in her happiness; the invisible photographer had caught her smiling into the sun, all teeth and optimism.

"Oh. That's my grandmother," Ben had said when she'd asked.

"The senator?"

"Yes." He'd picked the frame up, considering it. "She died the year after this was taken."

Rey knew the story in abstract; Padmé Amidala Naberrie, one of the first female senators, a champion of civil liberties and women's rights. She'd died in childbirth and her husband had been exposed for espionage, defecting to the Soviet Union not long before. That particular fact of Leia's parentage had hung over her political ambitions like a guillotine.

The photograph, though; that wasn't abstract, and Rey had felt oddly anguished at the needless loss. Ben had set it back down without another word, and when he'd disappeared to another room—now she couldn't recall why, or what they'd been doing, only this one bright spot in a day otherwise faded into memory—Rey had picked it up, turned it over in the glass frame. The back of the photograph had said, in handwriting which spoke to a mid-century education, _Padmé at Georgica Beach April 1960_.

She'd turned it back over, tracing Padmé's face. Her eyes were vibrant even with the picture's grain and age; dark, intelligent, as deep as the ocean behind her.

 _Ben has your eyes_ , Rey had realised.

Now it was her own face she was looking for in the memory of Padmé's. The shape, perhaps, and their full mouths, the angles of their cheeks; but Rey found it difficult to see Padmé's _spark_ in her own features. Padmé had been someone who _meant_ something; how could Rey compare?

But then, she thought, hadn't Ben been the same? So frustratingly unable to understand how he shone for her; like lightning in a dark sky.

* * *

The hour was early, and the light reflected that, gossamer and delicate as Rey descended the stairs. The hem of her dress whispered against the floorboards. She was in pursuit of the other groom, with Rose swapped and settled in Finn's room, and so Rey knocked on the door of the lounge; heard the happy, bouncing tone of Poe's voice as he called, "Come in!"

He was turning away as Rey opened it, arms bent back over his head to drape a tie around his neck. Kes was there too, buttoning his own shirt up over his vest, and behind them, not where she'd expected him to be—

Ben.

The broad expanse of his back was to her, his head tilted up to look at a painting hung high on the wall. His hair was brushing along the collar of his shirt, hands slung into his pockets. He turned at the sound of the door, and caught her gaze. There were no outward signs of the night before, of the hours he'd spent in the same bed as someone else; but Rey felt them all the same.

Her eyes fell to the rest of him, and she asked, "Are you wearing _all black_ to a wedding?"

Ben looked down at his black suit and black shirt and thin black tie, and then back to her. "Uh. Yes. Yes, I am."

She didn't explain that it made him look good enough to eat; abbreviated instead to, "Well, I guess _funereal_ is still smart."

The corner of Ben's mouth twitched. "Thanks.”

When Rey looked back, Poe was concentrating on the knot of his tie, but the lines of his face were almost too neat; like he'd been listening and was pretending not to.

She ignored it. "How’re you feeling?"

He grinned. “Better than the first time I flew an F-16.”

“You didn’t shut up about that for weeks,” Ben said. He moved somewhere behind her, and Rey couldn’t decide if he felt so close because he was, or if she was imagining it.

Poe jumped up and down, puffing his cheeks and then exhaling, psyching himself up like he really was about to climb into the cockpit of a supersonic jet. He and Finn were so different, Rey thought, watching Poe move happily, restlessly around the room. Finn was more cautious, more likely to think ahead, to observe and analyse and calculate the consequences before they did things; Poe would jump headfirst into any course of action if he thought it was the right one. And yet. They balanced each other out.

“I don’t actually think you look like you’re going to a funeral,” she said, catching Ben in her peripheral vision. She wasn't imagining it; he had moved closer.

“I know.” There was the unexpected heat of his hand ghosting along her back; and then he leaned in, voice smooth and quiet, and said, “You look beautiful.”

The praise flushed over her like a blush. She turned; found she couldn't meet his gaze, and so, out of habit, without quite meaning to, she smoothed Ben's tie and brushed invisible lint from his shoulders.

His eyes dropped to her mouth and then back up again. It pierced Rey’s lungs, the same way it had the first time he’d done it, hours into their acquaintance, standing outside a bar to ‘get some air’ whilst their friends were still inside.

“Rey,” he began, and she didn't know what she wanted to hear; only that she wanted to say, _fall in love with someone else tomorrow; give me one more day._

A knock cut in, a _rap-tap_ on the front door that deadened Kes and Poe’s chatter. Ben stepped back, leaving a rush of air in his wake, and Rey swallowed her beating heart away, smoothing at the soft chiffon of her dress for something to do with her hands.

“Amilyn!” she heard Poe cry from the hall. “Lando! You made it.”

Ben's words—whatever they might have been—died, and so did Rey's. There were footsteps on the stairs, predicating a swell of people, and she could hear Leia's voice, Finn's. Poe laughed, and through the gap in the door Rey saw him with his hands over his eyes, grinning at Finn like they were teenagers. _The groom can't see the groom before the wedding._

“Ready to join the fray?” Ben's eyes were soft, like he was asking her something more important.

Months of agreeing with Finn about the fold of this napkin and the pattern of that pocket square flashed before her. She still had no real idea of why it mattered; but Finn cared, and so she would too.

“I don't think I ever left the fray, but—sure.”

Neither of them moved. Ben's face shifted, until he was wearing that _look_ , the one which made her feel like a legal argument he was trying to parse. The voices in the hallway drifted into white noise.

“Rey—” He said again, and this time she knew what was coming; Ben was going to explain Kaydel, to sever Rey’s final tie to him—

—but the clock struck, shouting the hour, and if there was a spell woven into the space between them (between Ben's secrets and Rey's heart), it broke. Rey cleared her throat, gestured behind her to where the voices had crescendoed; said, “I really should, you know. Join in. I've got best man duties.”

“Okay.” Ben nodded. “Sure.”

He stepped away, and it was a microcosm of the weekend; one forward, two back.

* * *

The truth was that Rey had never been to a wedding; she'd never had enough friends for an adequate sample size. Now she'd spent a year pouring over Finn's Pinterest boards and spreadsheets, a year waking up to find new Wunderlist tasks assigned to her overnight, and she knew more about marriage licenses in New York state than she could possibly want to. Rey considered herself an expert on the mechanics of matrimony.

And yet. Standing in a garden in the Hudson Highlands, with the late fall sunshine on her face, the reality stole her stoicism. The people they knew were gathering in those neat rows of chairs, twisting back to speak to each other. She could see the _Air Force_ gang and the _New York_ gang and the _miscellaneous_ gang; and then other faces, lesser known. _That's Ackbar_ , Finn had whispered, encompassing an old man whose Admiral's uniform was outdated and immaculate; _and that's Mon_ , for a tall woman with short-sheared hair, in a dress that would, on someone less elegant, look like a bed sheet.

Finn checked his watch and puffed his cheeks, huffed the air out. They were waiting a little ways off, on the lawn; he would meet Poe there, and they'd walk down the aisle together.

“I'm nervous. I didn't think I'd be nervous.”

“You’re not nervous,” Rey said, against her own butterflies. “You’re just excited.”

“But I feel sick. Should I feel sick?”

“Sick is good. Sick means there’s something to care about.”

He didn't look like he believed her, but he nodded all the same. His gaze hit her hair.

"That's pretty."

"Thanks."

“Leia?”

“Yes.”

"Yeah, I figured. Always the braids, right?" He looked thoughtful. "She'll be pleased. That you let her, I mean."

Rey picked Finn's wrist up, turned it to look at the cufflink. She'd done the same thing three hours ago, snapping them into place for him. They were vintage, brass and round, stamped with an eagle, a shield, a ring of stars. Air Force, borrowed from Kes; Finn's _something old_.

“Thanks,” she said. “For—for."

How could she say it? _Thanks for agreeing to cut half our friends out of my life? Thanks for letting my emotional baggage come to your wedding? Thanks for saying hello to me ten years ago, when I had nothing and nobody?_

He tugged his wrist, to the effect that Rey came with it, and Finn draped his arms around her, pressing her nose into the lapel of his suit. The silk was soft and warm against her cheek.

“You know you're my ride or die, right?” The rumble of his words left Finn's chest and entered her heart. "I mean, Poe is too, obviously, and Rose, but you'll always be the one I've loved the longest." He hugged her tighter. "You don't stop being my soulmate just because I'm marrying the other one."

For the first time in days, something pure bubbled up inside her. In this moment it was only Rey and her best friend on the morning of his wedding; the heartache he'd held her hand through faded out, like tuning a radio.

She leaned back, held him at arm's length. He was in blue, a deep, rich shade the colour of royalty. His face was shining with new possibilities, with where the day would go. She was so happy for him it was almost painful.

"You look so handsome, you know that?"

He grinned. “Of course.”

“Good. Because Poe’s just walked out the door.”

Finn inhaled, eyes snapping to a point behind them. Poe strode across the grass, bathed in sunshine, all sparkling eyes and strong jaw, so handsome that he appeared for all the world like he'd been carved by Rodin; save for the sight of Bibi trotting next to him, a ringbearer cushion strapped to his back.

Finn turned to Rey with a look that contained the wonder of the universe. “Wow.”

“I know.” Rey tugged Finn's bow tie straight one last time. “Ready to get hitched?”

He nodded, eyes still fixed on Poe. Rey squeezed Finn's hand and slipped away.

She took her position at the bower, off to the side of where Finn would be in a few moments, and from the cover of her bouquet she waved to Rose, who’d moved into the same place for Poe.

 _Ahhh!_ Rose mouthed, grinning, and Rey enunciated back, _I know!_

As she glanced away she spotted Ben a few rows back, sat with his mother on one side, Lando on the other. Kaydel was in the row behind, arms fixed against the back of Ben's chair; he'd turned his head to listen to her. They looked—comfortable. That was the word for it. Like two pieces that fitted. Rey had always felt that she and Ben were a smashed vase glued back together; broken fragments which matched but would never be whole.

 _Maybe this is better_ , she thought.

Ben shifted; over his shoulder Kaydel met Rey's gaze and smiled, and Ben noticed, did the same. It was small, a lopsided tilt to his mouth, but it took the butterflies Rey already had and multiplied them. She broke their gaze and looked at the grass beneath her feet; breathed.

* * *

“Seriously though, that—” and Rose raised her glass with the sway of someone a few drinks in, “was fucking beautiful.”

“Seconded.” Kaydel raised her beer too. “Fucking beautiful.”

The evening sun was long on the grass, casting shadows that stretched and then distorted in the glow of the fairy lights. The vows had been exchanged; the speeches made; and the scent of Kes’s tamales was fading from the air. The replacement cake sat in the middle of the long table; or what was left, anyway, Rey picked crumbs off her plate with the pad of her finger.

“Fucking beautiful,” she murmured, watching people drink and mingle and laugh. The DJ—if that’s what you could call a Spotify playlist and a giant speaker lashed into the branches of a tree—was serenading them with pop and motown. Finn and Amilyn stood at the edge of the Persian rug, their backs to her, but Rey could see what they were watching; Poe rolling his hips, biting his lip as he shimmied across the rug.

Contentment pushed at her like the sweet burn of sipped wine. She was sober, and yet she was drunk on the occasion. If she could have measured the distance between this moment and the wobble in her mother's voice, the scent of _airport_ , the warmth of her hands on Rey's tiny shoulders as she'd said _I'll come back for you, sweetheart_ ; if Rey could measure the distance between those things, it wouldn't be in miles.

“Woah, okay, this is a good song.” Rose downed the dregs of her wine and stood. “Dancing. Now.”

Kaydel nodded and swigged her beer, stood too. Rey picked up the knife and sank it back into the cake.

“You coming?” Rose asked.

She shook her head. “Later.” She lifted the slice of cake as explanation.

Rose had that small frown, the one which meant you wouldn't escape until she was satisfied. “You sure?”

“Yes. Go and save Poe from himself.”

She waved them off. Rose was still; but then her frown eased, and she nodded, once, grasped gently at Kaydel's elbow. They turned and retreated into the light; Rey watched them go. At the edge of the carpet they kicked off their heels and jumped in, throwing their arms up, joining the song halfway through. _No—sleep—til Brooklyn—_

"Lost your dancing shoes?"

The voice slid out of the dark, and Rey bit down too hard on the cake, shoved her plate up under her chin to catch the crumbs. It must have been quite the sight, because when she looked into the dark she saw Luke's mouth twisted, trying not to laugh.

He sat down in the chair beside her. It was a heavier motion than the last time she'd seen him, and he let out an _"oof"_ as he landed.

Rey stared; belatedly swallowed the cake. Her brain had been set to fire, a sense-stopping shock that echoed with Ben's voice, sneering, pained— _he wants to save my soul; don't you, Uncle Luke?_

 _He can’t make it, something to do with work,_ Finn had shrugged months before, and Rey had taken his word for it; Luke was always travelling, always out of reach in far-flung places where people needed help. It was good work; Rey had appreciated that, even as she couldn't reconcile it with how he saw Ben.

“No,” was all she said. Her heart beat wildly. _How could Luke be here?_

On honed instinct, she looked for Ben; found him on the edge of the rug, leaning against the nearest tree. His arms were crossed, but he was smiling, his attention caught on Kaydel, whose attention was caught on Rose.

“You can't—”

She was already flooded with mourning for their fragile peace and how it was about to break. Ben would look across, see his uncle, and try to make good on his last promise; the midnight resonance of glass smashing against Leia's kitchen wall, the detritus of Han's wake around them, Ben's face turning red as he pointed across the room. _Next time I see you I will fucking kill you, do you understand?_

“I know, I know, it's bad form to drop in on a wedding. It just takes a while to get back from Jedha.” Luke took a small wrapped parcel from his pocket and shook it. “I did bring a gift.”

A gift? Who cared, under the circumstances? Rey felt slow with speechlessness. She wanted the floor to swallow her whole—or let it swallow Ben, or _Luke_ , preferably, before someone committed murder, but—

Ben turned his head. Rey held her breath.

He tensed, shoulders hunching, smile falling, but he didn't move; not until he nodded once, sharply, and looked away again. Beside her, Luke waved just as short, just as sharp; but it was like seeing the _aurora borealis_ in the desert, and Rey was only aware of her mouth hanging open once she shut it.

She saw Ben glance at her again, and then back to Kaydel. Luke was watching her too. He was wearier than she remembered, beard scraggly and a paler, older grey. His eyes, though; they were the same, as bright and striking as ever.

“I take it you weren't expecting this reunion.”

His voice was measured, but his mouth quirked with displeasure. Rey shook her head.

“Don't blame Ben, it's not his fault. He—well, I haven't given him much opportunity to tell me.”

“I see.”

Even with two words Luke could convey disappointment. It struck Rey how hard that must have been on a teenage boy.

But perhaps it was well-placed. She'd told herself she was doing _so well_ —leaving a toxic relationship, moving on from her childhood—yet all she'd done was use her favourite defence mechanism; denial.

Luke patted her hand. This time his tone was compassionate.

“I'm going to assume, from the fact you're both here and nobody's crying, that things are at least okay? Between the two of you?”

 _Can we be friends? He’s trying. Don’t end up hurting yourself. You look beautiful_.

Rey watched Kaydel hold her hand out, beckon Ben closer; watched Ben's head shake as Kaydel grabbed his wrists and pulled. He was far too heavy, too strong for her to really move him; and so when he went, it must have been willingly. _Can't forget_ , the speakers sang, _we only get what we give_.

Ben really _didn’t dance_ —something Rey, who had thrown herself around every inch of his apartment to songs he hated, knew well—but Kaydel was doing more than enough for the both of them. Ben was her anchor point on the Persian rug, and she puppeted him into twirling her around and around. Ben was hiding his enjoyment in the corner of his mouth.

Rey's own request rolled back to her. _Just give me one more day._ The sun’s last sliver slipped below the mountains, plunging them into evening proper, and the fairy lights glimmered. It was closing out earlier than she’d hoped, but—she’d had it, hadn’t she? The day she’d asked for. Almost.

 _I want you to be happy_ , she thought, watching Ben pretend not to laugh. The ghost of Rey's heartache hummed. People never really let go of their first loves; perhaps it was why she'd said, _of course, Poe, you can invite who you like_. Perhaps it was why Kaydel had come all this way, after all this time.

 _Let the past die_ , Ben had always said; but as she watched him, older and mellowed and steady and _happy_ , Rey figured it could be reborn too.

She inhaled sharply, pulled back her tears before they fell. In recognising the pain it seemed to have lost its power; to matter less, suddenly.

“Yeah,” she said, controlling the crack in her voice. “Yeah, things are good.”

“Good. We missed you, kid.” Luke squeezed her hand and let go. “Leia and I talk about you a lot.”

“Really?”

“Yep. You, Ben, Han. The whole family.”

 _Family_. Her chest warmed. Of them all, she'd known Han would be like a father from the moment he shook her hand and said, _a lapsed mechanic, huh? Y'ever worked on a 1960 Ford Falcon?_

"Han would have enjoyed this," she said. “Everyone being together.”

"He'd have pretended to hate it." Luke was watching the party, but his gaze was far away; in some other time, some other place. “But, yes, you're right. He would have.”

“Under the grumbling.”

Luke smiled. “Ben had to learn it from somewhere.”

It was odd, hearing Ben's name in Luke's voice; too many awkward family dinners, too many rows, too many silent car rides home with Ben's hands tight on the steering wheel. After Han died it had been too much of Ben's bewildered grief, struggling to grasp that his beloved father was no longer alive for him to hate.

“How—” she began; walked it back, unsure of her place to ask.

"With a lot of patience," Luke replied. "From both of us." He shifted in the chair, unbuttoned his suit jacket. "Of course, the real test will be working together. At least I'll be out of the country, mostly, otherwise I think familiarity would breed contempt."

He said nothing further, but Rey’s silence clearly caught him; he queried it with raised brows.

“He just said he'd left the First Order, he didn't—” _Didn't say he'd turned his life this far upside down._

“Ah. Well, Snap’s moving on and I need someone to run the practice from New York. Ben might have done work I don't approve of, but—he never stopped being a great lawyer. I figured if he had the right opportunity he could really shine.” For the first time, Rey thought she saw shame in the lines of Luke’s face. “I needed to give him that.”

It was, inexplicably, her flash point. Her brain stalled. _Ben_ worked for _Luke_? They'd arrived in the mirrorverse, and no one had told her.

“You okay?” Luke leaned over and frowned. “You look a bit—”

 _Overwhelmed._ She shut her eyes and squeezed them tight. Too much happening too quickly; too many feelings occupying too small a space.

“I'll be fine.” She opened her eyes. “It's just—a lot.”

“I can stay, if you like.” Luke looked concerned. “The party hasn't missed me for three days, it can wait another three minutes.”

“No, I just need—” _some space,_ “—some water. Go on,” and she conjured a smile. “They'll be happy to see you.”

“If you're sure.”

Rey stood, and Luke stood with her, still creased with concern. He was so kind, she thought; had spent so long unable to understand his own cruelty. Clearly Ben wasn't the only one who'd gone through a metamorphosis.

She hugged him, an impulse which brought the scent of old man's aftershave and something richer, earthier; his travels, always on his skin. He patted her back.

She let go, trekked off across the grass. The ground was steady under Rey’s feet, but she felt like she might float away at any moment.

* * *

On the veranda stairs she tripped and grasped the railing; took the moment to breathe, to slow down her heart and head.

She had to open three cupboards in the kitchen before she found a glass. Rey ran the water until it was cold, gulped it down in seconds, filled the glass again. This time she drank a little slower. The window was above the counter top, but the kitchen bulb was bright and turned the glass opaque; all Rey could see was the _bokeh_ of the fairy lights, the blurs between that promised people.

It helped, to find something indistinct as everything else crystallised. Luke and Ben, Leia and Ben, Ben and Kaydel; their worlds had continued turning, even as Rey stood still.

 _You’re a mess_ , she told the reflection in the window. _You need to sort yourself out_.

Voices on the veranda tightened her grip on the glass. Footsteps creaked over the floorboards, and there was the scrape of someone moving a chair aside.

“Ben—” Kaydel’s voice skimmed over the top of the party, nearer than the music, “—you’re a fucking _idiot_.”

It rang in Rey’s ears— _fucking idiot_ —and she backed towards the pantry door before she’d thought about it. Inside it was cool and dark; a contrast to the kitchen, visible in the gap between door and frame.

Kaydel was first; then Ben. She leaned against the island with one hip, arms crossed. Her face was in profile, the line of her mouth tight. Ben sat back against the counter, as directly opposite the pantry door as he could be. If he looked up, looked hard enough, he’d see Rey hiding in the dark.

Kaydel sighed. “Seriously, Ben.”

 _Shit_ , Rey thought. Okay. Whatever this was, she was hearing it.

Ben's hands were in his pockets. “I know.”

“You said you’d talked to her. I assumed that meant you’d _talked to her_.”

“How is that not the same thing?”

“Don’t play dumb—”

“I’m not, _how is it not the same thing_.”

Kaydel rubbed her mouth with her knuckles, like she was trying to scrub words away. When she spoke again, her tone had regained some of its natural softness.

“Not just, you know, the act of talking. I meant _talking to her about me_.”

Rey's heart squeezed, mixing itself up with the guilt in her gut for eavesdropping.

“You’re right. I know.”

“I feel so bad.” Kaydel sighed. “We shouldn’t have shared that room.”

 _Clothes on the comforter, like a matched pair_. Suddenly Rey felt _so tired_ , and she leaned against the pantry shelf; winced as she moved a tin a few scraping millimetres with her shoulder. The scene in the kitchen continued, unaffected.

Sorry.” Ben looked up now. “I put you in a shitty position.”

“You did.” Kaydel pushed off from the island, crossed two steps to the sink, and embraced him. “My stupid, idiotic big brother.”

 _Wait, what_.

Rey’s brain froze, then re-started. She angled her head, as though listening better would make sense of the senseless.

Kaydel brushed her cheek over Ben’s chest, once, twice, then looked up at him with those wide, expressive eyes. For all that they shared no genetics, suddenly it was true; she looked _exactly_ like a kid sister.

“The minute she got out of that car I knew this would happen. Just from the look on your face.” She squeezed Ben where she’d looped her arms around his middle. “I like her a lot. I’m glad you finally fucking told me about her, _properly_.”

Rey shut her eyes. The kitchen light still pushed against her eyelids, left the impression of Ben and Kaydel there; but as the microseconds passed it blurred into colour and disappeared.

“For what it’s worth,” Kaydel was saying in the blackness, “I’ve never seen you be somebody’s idiot the way you’re her idiot.”

“Are there any scenarios where I’m not an idiot, between the two of you?”

Kaydel’s _no_ was emphatic. A pause followed: Rey kept her eyes closed, but she heard the rustle of fabric, then the tap running.

“You need to tell her.”

Rey opened her eyes, squinted against the stark light. Now Ben and Kaydel were standing at the sink. Rey had Kaydel’s profile again. Ben was pouring a glass of water.

“Kay—”

His tone was a warning. Kaydel seemed undeterred.

“Take your head out of your ass, Ben. You can’t be the only one with choices. Don’t you think Rey deserves to decide for herself?”

Ben ran the tap until the glass almost overflowed. Rey realised she was holding her own breath.

“I don’t want to—”

“Burden her, I know, _I know_ , but out of everyone I thought _you’d_ understand why not having a choice is worse.”

 _I didn’t have a choice_ , Ben had told her, on those nights in the dark. _They had my future mapped out and I had to follow it, until someone told me I didn’t._

Ben sipped the water again. He was staring at a midpoint which he clearly couldn’t see, and wearing his particular kind of soft sadness; lowered lashes, a gentle frown.

“What if she says no?”

Kaydel’s demeanour mellowed. Rey wondered if hers had done the same; except for her heart, still punching at her ribcage.

“Then at least it will be her _own_ no. Not just you deciding what’s best for her.” Kaydel poked him gently in the arm. “That’s not healthy either.”

Ben considered Kaydel for a long moment. “I’m still fucking up, aren’t I?”

“Sometimes.” She switched from poking him to a hand on his shoulder. “But you get it now. That’s a start.”

Rey’s own fingers caged her mouth, like she was keeping something in. Her frozen thoughts transmuted, growing hot with the feeling wedged in her throat; a kind of expanding elation, a rounded breath that her body could no longer contain.

“Oh—” Kaydel tilted her head. “Holy shit, this is that song—” and she rapidly bashed her palm against Ben’s shoulder—god, of _course_ she was basically his little sister— “You know, when you went away for college and I sent you the cassette and made you play it in the car forever.”

“Jesus, I’m not going to forget, am I—”

But she was already pushing Ben to the door, and where there had been activity there was abrupt silence. The veranda door squeaked—the party was momentarily loud—and clattered back.

Rey breathed out in one sharp exhale; slumped against the shelves. Her head spun; her heart refused to calm down.

She pushed at the pantry door, took the few steps to the sink. Her glass was still there, next to Ben’s; she refilled and drank it in twenty seconds.

When she set the glass back down she braced her hands on the edge of the sink, and her back curved with a sob that built in her chest and gasped itself out of her mouth, dry and surprised. Her vision blurred, and she blinked. The tears fell straight down onto the tiled floor.

Another sob, and then another; and then there were large, warm hands on her back and a beloved voice edged in worry as it said, “Hey, hey, why—”

Ben manoeuvred her around and bound her close, ran his hands over her back. He tucked her head under his chin and turned his face into her hair.

“Don’t cry,” he murmured. “Don’t cry.”

It was building, not lessening, the way her back heaved, and Ben kept rubbing circles into Rey’s shoulder blades; but there was something else—a ballooning happiness that she couldn’t control—and her body shook harder; not with tears, now, but laughter.

Ben leaned away, hands still on her back; looked down at her with a furrowed brow. If anything it made Rey laugh harder.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, through tears and mirth. “Sorry.”

He opened his mouth and closed it again. It made him look like a broken wind-up toy, and Rey’s heart swelled. It was _burning_ , this happiness.

In the silence, her laughter faded. She reached up, hand stutteringly slow, and placed her palm against Ben’s cheek.

His eyes widened, just a little; she felt his sharp intake of breath through her chest.

Gently, gently, she brushed her thumb over Ben’s mouth. His eyes fluttered, then closed, and he clasped his own fingers around her wrist; turned his face into the touch.

Rey held her breath.

Ben kissed her palm; opened his eyes, looking for her reaction.

His heart was beating _so fast_ , she could feel it under her other hand. She pushed up on tip-toes. The space between them lessened; now they were only inches apart, and Rey could see all the flecks of colour in Ben’s irises.

He nodded, the slightest inclination of his head. Rey closed her eyes and leaned in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I hope you enjoyed the resolution to the Kaydel conspiracy! Your theories were all wonderful, and perhaps, in another _Embers_ universe, she really is a spy (my thanks to [Dalzo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dalzo/pseuds/Dalzo) for that one).
> 
> This fic will now go on a mini winter hiatus, as I'm participating in the [Reylo Fanfiction Anthology](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/ReyloFanfictionAnthology) gift exchange [After the Blazing Fire Dies](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/RFFA_After_the_Blazing_Fire_Dies/profile) and [The Writing Den](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/reylowritingden)'s [winter fic exchange](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/winterficexchange). This fic is almost completely written, so don't worry—it will be updated after Christmas!
> 
> Come and talk to me about this chapter on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sciosophia) (and [tumblr](http://sciosophia.tumblr.com)); I love hearing from you all!
> 
> My pinned tweet for this fic/my fandom twitter is [here](https://twitter.com/sciosophia/status/1069728354805448704). The tumblr moodboard for this fic is [here](https://sciosophia.tumblr.com/post/181182026300/stunning-moodboard-by-rebelrebelreylo-embersrey). 
> 
> The Spotify playlist for this chapter is [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/mvpud6xluc7nn7ptf5txklw4p/playlist/13y8vTuJhpXIoEA3GpfHMB?si=hYP-t8qWQjeqD5Ft04uDLQ). 
> 
> [Avenged Sevenfold](https://open.spotify.com/artist/0nmQIMXWTXfhgOBdNzhGOs?si=EelBuwRlQCOvWhN2orQOgw) appear on [the official _Star Wars_ Kylo Ren playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/official_star_wars/playlist/0mJWJsZTz0I1iXFFeyRzcS?si=5aB48Mr_SdeQJLVTcqJ3_Q) on Spotify.
> 
> Kaydel and Rose's "good song" is [_No Sleep Till Brooklyn_](https://open.spotify.com/track/5qxChyzKLEyoPJ5qGrdurN?si=ryWZoxOzR2SVWOj9th53aA) by the Beastie Boys (they're Brooklynites, after all). The song Ben and Kaydel dance (badly) to is [_You Get What You Give_](https://open.spotify.com/track/1Cwsd5xI8CajJz795oy4XF?si=P59pB2m8QWadu5doOZmL0Q) by New Radicals.
> 
> The page dividers were coded using [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35610251/style-hr-with-image) as a guide.


	4. Saturday (ii).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's time to earn that rating... FYI that safe sex does some character work in this fic, and the tags have been updated accordingly.
> 
> Content warning in this chapter for discussion of therapy and brief mentions of child abandonment. 
> 
> Thank you again, so, _so_ much, to everyone who has bookmarked, left kudos, commented, and/or rec'd this fic, both on tumblr and twitter. I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sciosophia) and [tumblr](http://sciosophia.tumblr.com) (for now) if you'd like to say hi.
> 
> Thank you to [RebelRebel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RebelRebel/pseuds/RebelRebel) for her wonderful beta'ing, as ever.
> 
> p.s. Happy (early) Birthday to [JenfysNest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenfysNest)!
> 
> .

 

_Saturday (ii)._

Kissing Ben was a dream she'd lived already; the kind you woke from with a start, jolted into being by its clarity. They'd done this in Williamsburg, five years and a lifetime ago, standing outside her apartment door with the scent of _bar_ and _beer_ on them, with the noise of someone else's party ringing inside the stairwell. Now it was the sound of their own party drifting in on the breeze.

Ben chased the swell of her lower lip, grazed it with his teeth, just the way she remembered. Her back arched, turning her into a crescent moon, pushing her hips and her chest and her mouth as close to Ben as possible. She remembered this feeling, too.

Except—

She stopped. Not quite consciously, her hands dropped to the lapels of his jacket and gripped like they were a lifeline.

“I eavesdropped on your conversation with Kaydel,” she said. It felt like an imperative truth; not to be moved beyond until it was out in the world.

Ben blinked. There was a brief moment where he looked hurt; but then his expression smoothed over, and he grasped her waist; dug his fingers into her flesh, just a little.

“I slept in the same bed as her.”

 _I know_ , she almost said—almost creased her brow in confusion—but then she understood it for what it was; a smooth, monotone confessional. A plea, to echo her own. _Forgive me._

There were other things in his words, too: _I’m sorry I lost myself in my job; I’m sorry I kept secrets from you; I’m sorry I was a monster of my own making._

She leaned up, anchored by her hands on his jacket, and kissed his forehead— _I’m sorry I didn’t understand_ —his temple— _I’m sorry I ignored all the problems_ —his cheek— _I’m sorry I never really said that I loved you._

When she stood back, his eyes were that deep ocean. Their confessions hung in the air, a balancing act on a pair of invisible scales. Two sets of hurts to make one whole.

 _I forgive you_ , Rey thought. _And myself._

Perhaps he knew; his fingers tightened, and Rey’s heart rushed with the strength of his grip, with the _power_ of him as he dragged her closer.

The line of his shoulders snapped, and he tilted down to kiss Rey, hard. He was still _so warm,_ the way he’d always been, and it melted through her, a literal heat to stoke what was pooling between her legs. His palm burned the skin beneath her dress as he pressed his hand into the base of her spine. She could feel his cock against her belly, and her own moan was a surprise, a rush of pleasure that she hadn’t meant to verbalise.

She broke the kiss, needing air; tilted her head back, and Ben must have been working on the same reignited instinct as Rey, because he kissed her jaw, mouthed along the slope of her neck, as though they’d been doing this only yesterday; only an hour ago.

"Rey," he murmured against her skin.

She dug her nails into the soft skin at the base of his skull. And then, like her name was a prayer in Ben’s mouth, like it had broken the seal—

“Fuck,” he breathed, pressing his words into the hollow of her throat. “Rey, I love you, I still love you so fucking much—”

 _I love you,_ he’d said that first time, perched on the arm of her horrible couch, and Rey—stood at her kitchen counter, hair pulled into a chaotic bun, wearing no shirt and old sweats—had stared at him over her slice of greasy $5 pizza.

“Ben,” she sighed now. She tangled her hands in his hair—god, she’d missed it, it was a fucking _miracle—_ and his own tightened even more.

“We should talk,” he said into her skin, cutting himself off with a gentle bite to her jaw, her ear.

“We should,” she breathed.

“Because talking is good.”

His message was getting lost in the graze of his teeth, in the sensation of hard muscle under Rey’s hands. She felt like she’d submerged herself in a bath; near to weightless, pulse fluttering, holding her breath.

“Take me to bed,” she murmured.

He stilled, so deeply it felt like he’d stopped breathing.

“Rey.”

Now her name was flat with control, and a hint of warning.

She splayed her fingers out across the front of his shirt. They caught in the gaps between buttons, and she could feel how hot his skin was, underneath. She hadn’t touched him like this for years. Literally, she realised.

“Take me to bed,” she said again, louder.

She pushed, lightly; realised that Ben’s eyes were very dark.

“We should—take some time,” he said, voice low, “and talk about this first. Before we do any—”  

“I don’t want _time_ ,” she cut in, realising it was true as she said it, “and I don’t want to _wait_ anymore, Ben, I’ve done enough waiting and I—” Her heart was speaking quicker than her mouth, and she paused; finally said, “Time works both ways. We can give ourselves more of it, but we can—we can waste it, too.”

A moment; then:

“I want you to be sure. There’s nothing—I’m not—” He took her hand; paused, breathed, started again. “There’s nothing I’d rather do right now than carry you up those stairs. But I’m not— _expecting_ anything.”

His words were weighted, earnest. They made Rey want him more.

“Take me to bed,” she whispered.

Third time lucky.

* * *

The sloping attic ceiling was too low for Ben everywhere but at its centre, so he rectified it by dipping his head down to kiss Rey, to push her back until her legs hit the edge of her mattress, and they fell. Ben was heavy, and Rey chased up into it; pressed their hips together, let her knees fall open.

“You’re so—” Ben said, losing his words against her mouth. The skylight was open, and the music was fainter up here, the chatter indistinct. It made everything feel abstracted, like they’d snuck up to another world instead of another room.

She tightened her fingers in his hair, and Ben hummed, a deep, decadent sound that hurled itself right through Rey’s body. His cock was hard through the layers of fabric between them, and she rolled into it, stole his breath; stole her own name from his mouth. _Rey._

“I’m here,” she sighed; and then, with a little more of her brain in the right gear, suddenly feeling the press of her dress against her own skin like a vice, she let go and pushed him gently upright. Her body followed his like they were connected by a thread.

“It’s not—I’m alright, I don’t want to stop,” she said, as Ben’s hands hovered around her elbows, suddenly afraid to touch her. “I just want to—I need to get this _off—_ ”

She began to shrug her shoulders out of her dress. A moment as Ben watched, as though assessing whether to join in again; and then he helped her push the straps down, skimming his fingers over her skin.

She twisted her arms behind her back. “There’s a—”

Ben leaned around and held the fabric steady while Rey pulled down the zip. Such a simple thing, but it made her heart thunder, echoing with _this memory_ and _that memory;_ with saying _can you unzip me?_ as she stood at the sink in a party dress, brushing her teeth.

As soon as it was done she snatched her hands back and started on the buttons of Ben’s shirt, kissing him as she went, and Ben caught on to the idea with admirable speed, so that now they were both undoing buttons, one after the other, until Rey could pull the shirt apart and smooth her hands over his bare skin. He was burning like her own lust.

With her dress pooled around her waist, the air was hitting Rey’s skin, suddenly bare, and it was cold until Ben covered one of her breasts with his palm.

“Fuck,” she groaned, head lolling down onto his shoulder. He stroked his thumb along her skin; first the side of her breast, and then skimming her nipple, so that she moaned harder and dug her nails into his heart. Ben’s breathing hitched, and the stutter carried down his arm to her flesh. She felt herself goosebump, exposed to the air.

“Off,” she mumbled, fumbling for his jacket. _“Off,_ now, please.”

Ben let go— _no,_ her brain supplied, terse with need as his skin left hers—shrugged the jacket off, threw it into the dark somewhere. Even two seconds without contact felt like too long; it was sweet relief to be pressed back into the bed, so that now the friction was Ben’s bare chest against hers, a delicious shift of skin-on-skin which slithered down to her cunt.

As if he knew, Ben reached for the skirts of her dress and yanked them up, scrabbling through material until his hand found her calf, then her knee, then her thigh; little touches, and still somehow enough that Rey needed an anchor. She closed her eyes, stretched her hands out above her head, gripped at the headboard.

“You’re tense,” he murmured, running his fingers up the inside of her thigh. “Relax.”

She exhaled, made a conscious effort to be _soft,_ to let her legs fall apart; to let Ben settle himself into the space they left. He trailed the hem of her underwear (plain cotton, so unsexy that she wanted to cringe); but he didn’t seem to be paying attention to their colour or fabric, only to pushing his fingers beneath the hem.

The first touch was a fleeting graze that snagged Rey’s breath; and then, even with his touch constrained by her underwear, Ben decisively dragged his finger up the length of her wet cunt.

She jackknifed, curving like she’d been pulled by that thread.

The corner of Ben’s mouth twitched. “Better.”

Rey grasped the air, looking for purchase, something to keep the moment from slipping away. Her hands found Ben’s hair, and she clasped and pulled, just a little, just enough to say _please, do it again._

Ben complied. His fingers were a hot, heavy weight against her cunt; and Rey chased the sensation, pressed into his hand.

“Don’t think I forgot,” he said, pressing his thumb against her clit. “Don’t think I forgot how much you like this.”

Rey was submerged in her senses, drink-sober and love-drunk, and she only realised belatedly that Ben was looking at her. His eyes were silvered by the moon so that they’d lost all their colour; now they were ink-black, dark with lust, and behind that—something deeper.

She reached down, fumbled her skirts out of the way until she found his hand under the cotton of her underwear.

“Ben, let me—”

She hooked her fingers into her knickers and started pulling them down. Ben joined in, tugging them off her hips and down her thighs, first one and then the other; a chaotic manoeuvre in the small space, in their unspoken agreement to keep touching each other, even as Rey was twisting her legs, inelegant in her urgency.

“Sorry,” she murmured, almost kneeing Ben in the face. She threw her underwear away, and Ben laughed, kissed her; first with some sweetness, and then hungry, his teeth abrasive on her lower lip. Rey bit right back, and Ben growled, a sound that drove itself into her, into how wet she was.

He grabbed her hips and pulled her down the bed, like she was nothing, like she weighed less than her half-worn dress. She laughed, a huff of surprised lust, and Ben echoed it; wore a grin that was almost mad, almost wild. He looked her over—her bare skin and her spread legs and her parted mouth—and it was _covetous._

In amongst the desire, something occurred to Rey, and she felt around for the words, trying to remember how to speak in proper sentences.

“I’m still clean,” she said. _There was nobody else._ “But—”

“Me too.” He settled back over her, exquisitely heavy and solid. “But I don’t think—”

“Yeah, I'm not on—”

 _...birth control,_  she didn't finish as he traced down from her knee, shifted slightly, and pushed two fingers into her cunt. Her breath was stolen, leaving her to moan a fragile _fuck_ on the exhale. She’d forgotten this. How had she forgotten this?

“So. We’re agreed. Condoms. Yes?”

His breathing was heavy, leaving his words to fall, staccato, against her hair. She could feel the tendons in his wrist flexing against her skin, a reflection of the angled stroke of his fingers, and it drew a murmured litany from her that had nothing to do with what she was actually trying to say.

“They’re—I have some in my suitcase,” she managed eventually. She flung her arm to the edge of the mattress, gesturing. Her other arm she threw over her eyes, so overwhelmed by the sudden _feeling_ of it all that she couldn’t look at what they were doing. “Ben—”

She wasn’t even sure what she was asking him—whether it was that she wanted his thumb back against her clit or she wanted his cock instead, and not just through their clothes—knew only that they both needed _something_ , and they needed to do whatever it was _immediately._

There was the brief press of his mouth against her throat, and then suddenly Ben was gone, the absence of him above her and inside her abrupt and bereft. She pushed up on her elbows, to see Ben across the room digging around in her suitcase. His hair was mussed from the way she’d been pulling it.

 _I did that to Ben,_ she thought, an old, domestic pleasure spiking low in her belly.

He found the box and stood up, moved back to the bed; but stopped just short of it, taking in the sight of her with a dazed expression, like he was punchdrunk. It was the first real, prolonged moment she’d had to look at him, and now Rey owned it; let herself be brazen, watching his body beneath the opened shirt and the low-slung waistband of his pants. She could see the creased fabric where his cock was hard.

Rey knelt up on the edge of the mattress, grabbed Ben’s open shirt, pulled him to her so that she could lick fervently at his mouth. He moaned, and she pulled harder, still kissing him, tilting them back and back until they were both tumbling down; and Rey twisting as they went, so that this time it was Ben whose back landed on the mattress with a too-loud thud, Ben whose breath escaped in a surprised _oof._ She kept the momentum, used it to swing her leg across and bracket his thighs with hers.

“Hi,” she said, looking down at him.

Ben stared at her in the moonlight. “Hi.”

Her skirts pooled around them, and Rey rearranged them so she could see his belt buckle, his zipper. Ben helped, pushing her dress aside with his free hand, the one which wasn’t clutching the box of condoms like it was the key to the universe. With his free hand he reached up to palm her breasts again, and Rey swallowed thickly, tried to concentrate on something more than how much wetter this was making her.  

She’d already worked out that this fuck was going to be hurried and libidinous, driven by two years of separation which, now, in this moment, felt like a needless century, and so she pressed the heel of her palm against the jut of his cock once, twice before she pushed everything aside and wrapped her fingers around him.

Ben hissed in gratification, jerking his hips up into her hand. She eased her palm up and down his cock— _fuck,_ it felt good, and familiar—and she realised she was languidly shifting her own hips to the same rhythm in anticipation.

“Ben,” she said, and he seemed to understand, because his hand left her breast to open the box of condoms. He fumbled with it; then, eyes narrowing, attention half-caught by something even as his lips were parted with pleasure—

“What—Rey, this is the _same box_ you had the last time we were using—fuck, let me check the expiration date—” but he was laughing, she could feel it shiver up through her cunt and her thighs.

“I think they're okay—” and she rolled her fingers up and over the head of Ben’s cock, marking it with his pre-cum. The motion broke into Ben’s laugh, turned it into something deeper.

“Fuck. _Fuck._ ” He was breathy with the rhythm of her hand, biting his lip as he stared at something on the box. His fingers were so tight around it they were crushing the cardboard. “Okay, these are fine, we can—”

Rey let go of his cock and grabbed for the box, plucked it out of his hand to seize one of the little foil squares. She chucked the box over her shoulder, and there was a light clatter as it landed somewhere on the floor beyond the bed, joining his jacket.

As she grappled with the box she surged down to kiss him; a little lacking in finesse for the sake of concentrating on the tear of the foil, but Ben didn’t seem to mind, tracing his tongue along her lip, a messy clash of their mouths which felt like the greatest thing Rey had ever tasted. He stroked her wrist as she fiddled with the condom, an encouraging touch against her pulse, and Rey thought her heart might burst.

She broke away, sat up to try and open the packet properly. Ben’s hand dropped to her knee.

“You’re distracting me,” she murmured without any force behind it, and in her peripheral vision, he smiled.

The corner of the packet tore off. Rey wasted as little time as possible; the foil wrapper was another casualty of the bedroom floor, and then she was rolling the condom down over Ben’s cock, the sensation evident in the low, growling groan he made. She shifted to a better position, sighing at the way his cock lined up against her cunt, a shared heat which spread through Rey’s veins. Almost. _Almost._

Ben was breathing heavily, she could hear it in the silence of the room. Rey’s eyes fluttered closed. His fingers still brushed gently over the skin of her knee, even if the rhythm of it was unsteady, now, dizzy with their fervour.

“Rey.” Ben’s voice was low and brittle. “Are you—”

"Yes."

An answer to a question that could have been anything. _Are you still sure. Are you still here. Are you still mine._

She opened her eyes. Ben was staring at her, eyes wide in the dark, lips parted. Rey felt for his hand on her knee, twisted their fingers together; and then she moved, losing her breath to the stretch of his cock, the gradual inward slide that drove all thoughts away as she shifted, sank _down, down._ It stung a little, more than it had the last time they’d done this; but that made sense, she supposed. She wasn’t used to him anymore.

Her own lost breath echoed in Ben. Rey could see the stillness of his chest, the absence of air as he tensed, eyes drifting half-shut. She was full of him, _everywhere,_ a hot, hard, heady feeling that was all she could concentrate on. For a moment, nothing existed outside of it.

Ben let go of her hand, drifted his own up the space between them. His fingertips floated over her skin, under her skirts, towards the crux of her cunt. It was the tipping line, overwhelming her, and she shook her head, took his hand and brought it up to her hip instead.

“It’s okay, just...give me a second.”

“Of course,” he murmured, gaze dazed.

Rey’s mind was thrumming, set adrift. Some primal part of her tightened the muscles of her cunt, adjusting to the stretch of his cock, and Ben found his breath with a sharp inhale, with the hard flex of his fingers against her hip. He circled her waist with both hands now, grip tight, like he was only just managing to stop himself pushing her into motion. He was tense with control; she could see it in the ripple of muscle under skin.

“Okay?” He sounded like he could barely speak.

Rey nodded, closed her eyes. “Uh huh.”

She moved, a speculative slide up, then down again, and—

Yes— _yes._ This was what she wanted. This was it.

She did it again, then again, faster, easier with each stroke, the stretch of Ben inside her moving from one side of uncomfortable to the other: to _satiating;_  to _satisfying_. Ben’s fingers gripped harder, and now, _now_ he was letting himself push her, exaggerating the roll of her hips with the pull of his hands; half-guide, half-driving-force.

He pushed up into her as she sank down, slamming them together, and she wasn’t expecting it. The pleasure almost hiccuped out of her, a choked groan that they might have laughed at if they weren’t so focused on fucking. Their rhythm was racing ahead of them, fast and careless; but it was also easy, and familiar. Like a memory overwriting itself. They’d been here before, too.

She leaned forward to balance herself on him, to fan her fingers out over his skin like a Rorschach inkblot; but he caught them instead, let her counter her weight with his own hands.

“I said I remembered what it was like—” and his voice was jarred by the rhythm they were setting, by the fever which was claiming them, “but this is, this is—”

 _This is everything,_ she thought, driving into his thrusts, cunt squeezing in anticipated pleasure. She was going to come soon, she could tell; hard and quick, too eager to fall over the edge now that they were finally here again.

Ben ran his palms along her arms, wrist to elbow to shoulder, smooth and reverent, until he could cup her shoulder blades and draw her down to him, to kiss Rey with her hair falling around their faces. The angle was new, and the head of his cock dragged exquisitely along the walls of her cunt.

“Everything,” he murmured into her mouth. Perhaps she’d said it aloud.

Now he held her face, nudged it up so he could kiss her again, untidy with split concentration, meeting her thrusts at this new angle. It was a pattern she knew, squeezing a gasp from her lungs the same way it had always done. Whatever he said, Ben clearly _had_ remembered.

This, Rey thought, was like riding a bike, except way, way better.

“Rey, let me—I want to touch you.”

 _You are touching me,_ she thought blankly, but he pushed her shoulders, rising with it to hustle her back, sitting them both up. Rey huffed at the way it changed their angle again.

“Ben—”

He grabbed her dress and ducked his hands under the material, trapped between them. When Rey looked down, all she could see was bright orange silk desaturated by moonlight.

“Ben, what—” she began; and then, as he rubbed a hard circle against her clit, _"_ _Oh._ ”

His laughter was ragged and breathless. Rey grasped his shoulders, digging in for leverage; because she needed to _move,_ to rise and fall and press against the heavy, circadian pressure of his thumb on her nerves. He leaned into her, mouth on her breasts, first one and then the other, the moan humming through her skin.

“Teeth,” she said; let go of his shoulders to find leverage in his hair instead.

Ben obeyed, grazing them over her nipple; and the fire, at last, sparked the waving roll of her pleasure, her cunt squeezing and tightening on his cock. She came with her head thrown back, pulling Ben’s hair, vision blurring in the dark room.

“Fuck,” Ben said, and then he was coming too, surprising both of them. She could feel the dulled twitch and throb of it, meeting her own fluttering aftershocks.

Gradually they slowed the rock of their bodies, relaxed to a stop, still wrapped up together. Ben’s face was buried in her chest, breath warm on her skin; almost too much for how sensitive it was, her orgasm still lazily rolling through her.

“Well,” he said eventually.

“Mmm.” She stroked his hair. Her hold on it was soft now, muscles too unwound to grip harder. “Quite.”

Lazily, they drifted back down to the mattress. Without quite giving her time to process it, Ben tightened his grip on her hips and gently lifted her off him. Rey moaned a protest at the separation before she could stop herself.

“It’s alright,” he murmured, a meaningless reassurance; but it still soothed that primal part of her brain, the one which was chanting over and over; _mine, mine, mine._

* * *

In the bathroom, her reflection stared back from the mirror as she wiped the stickiness of sex off her thighs, as she washed her hands. Her braid was a mess, her cheeks flushed, her mouth plump with kisses.

She undid her hair and combed it through with her fingers, left the bobby pins on the side of the sink. She ran the tap, splashed her face with water to try and cool some of the blush.

“Nope,” she told the reflection. “You still look thoroughly fucked.”

Ben was leaning back against the headboard when she came back. He’d taken off his shirt, and she could see the marks her nails had left on him; could see the way something in Ben shifted when he saw her, a tension which seemed to drain away.

“Hold on.” Rey tugged at the rest of her zipper, still half-closed. “Let me just—”

She shucked out of her dress; tried first to pull it over her head, and then, when it got stuck, to push it down and off her legs, kicking it away until finally she could boot it off into the corner.

“There,” she said. Now that she was back—watching the rise and fall of Ben’s chest, the way his pants were still undone—her endorphins rose to overtake her like a landslide. She sat on the bed, lay back, stretched out like a cat. Even now, with both of them spent, Ben was drinking the sight of her body down like water.

Under the endorphins some insecurity sparked, the knowledge that she was five years older than the first time they’d done this, two years older than the last time. She didn’t know if she looked the same; if she looked older, or different. If she looked _less._

Ben, though; he looked as delicious as she remembered, even with the few streaks of grey at his temple, even with the slightest hint of a softness which hadn’t been there before. It made sense, in the context of passing time.

Perhaps something of her doubt was in her face, because Ben reached out and smoothed his hand over her. His palm was warm against her skin, sweeping along her belly and down to her hip bone, then back again, over her breast, until he cupped her face.

He stroked his thumb across her cheek. “I dreamed of this. Every day you were gone.”

Maybe it was the post-sex high—or maybe it was everything, this entire long, long, _long_ weekend coalescing into one moment—but Rey could only bite her lip, overwhelmed.

Ben discarded his pants and boxers too—murmured, _well, these are ruined_ as he threw them across the room—and then he was climbing into bed with her, as warm as a furnace, waiting patiently for Rey to wriggle down into a position she was comfortable with.

“I forgot how much space you take up,” he said.

 _“I_ take up space?”

He trapped her legs between his own. “It’s not my fault this bed is tiny.”

That, Rey reflected, was very true.

She could concentrate on the sounds of the party again, now, stealing in through the gap in the skylight; music, a song from before she was born, and voices, a chattering hubbub that occasionally broke through with something familiar. Kes, Amilyn, Finn. It was all bracketed by Ben’s heartbeat, a reassurance under her ear.

“We’ll have to go back soon,” she said, thinking of her dress, crumpled on the floor.

Ben hummed. She could feel it, the same way she felt the subway under her feet when she stood in the right place on the sidewalk. Rey’s own body seemed heavy, like it had rebelled against gravity and would refuse to leave the bed when the time came.

“It’s not a pity promotion,” Ben said into the moonlight. “Just to clarify.”

Rey shifted up on her elbow, frowned down at him. “From Luke? Of course not. And you wouldn’t accept one anyway.”

“Good. Okay. I just—wanted to be clear about that.”

_Finally._

“Tell me?”

Ben’s gaze skittered away and then came back. A pause, and a deep breath.

“I quit the FO. I called my mom. Mom called Dr. Kenobi. We talked about Luke _a lot_.” His breath hitched on an unspoken syllable, as though there were other things; _we talked about_ _my father; about Anakin; about you_. “And then one day I googled Luke’s office number. I had to leave a message with his secretary and I kinda messed it up. _Hey, can you tell Luke that Ben Solo’s in therapy and wants you to call him?”_

He moved his shoulders, a sort of lying-down shrug, as though what he’d just said amounted to nothing.

“I’m proud of you.”

“I don’t deserve it.”

“Okay, I see you’re still a big dumb idiot when it comes to accepting praise.”

Ben’s mouth twitched. “Fine. But I mean it. I put you through a lot of shit. You don’t owe me anything. Forgiveness least of all.”

“And yet.”

 _I forgive you_ , she’d thought in the kitchen; _and myself._ Their troubled souls had pushed their pain in both directions; had wounded both ways, too.

“Even after I fucked up all weekend?”

Rey raised her eyebrows. “I’m literally naked in bed with you right now. I know you’ve fucked weekends up before, but—this is not one of those times.”

“Okay, so maybe the results are different—” and he ran his hand over the dip and slight curve of her hip, as though to test said results out. “—but I handled the Kay stuff like a real _champ._ ”

He bit the word out with sarcasm, flexed his fingers on her skin as he said it. Rey’s heart pinched, like it was still programmed to _hurt_ when she heard the name.

“I get it.” Her cheeks coloured, still caught on the shame of eavesdropping. “It sucked, but I get it.”

Ben studied her, fixating first on Rey’s face, and then the line of her shoulders, of her throat. At last, he held her gaze again.

“I was afraid. When we were—” _together,_ “—I was afraid that if you and Kay met, and you became friends, and then I lost one of you—I was afraid I’d lose you both, and then there’d be nobody.”

“Oh,” she said, quietly. The pain of Kaydel’s name changed into something that was no longer for herself; instead, it was Ben’s fear, Ben’s loneliness. A profound understanding of _how_ and _why_ swept over her like a wave. _I was afraid I’d lose you both._ “Oh.”

“Dr. Kenobi says I had _negative thinking patterns_.” Ben’s tone put the words into verbal quote marks. “Catastrophizing, specifically. I took the two people I loved most and turned them into the worst case scenario.” He grimaced. “I told him he should just agree I was an asshole and move on, but apparently that one is  _negative self-labelling._ ”

“He sounds pretty good.”

“He was my grandfather’s oldest friend and he has an answer for everything, and I can’t decide which is worse. But yes,” Ben said. “He is good.”

Outside, there was a lull as one song ended and another began. The trees rustled, and Rey felt the breeze sneak in and touch her the way Ben had. She folded herself down into his side again.

“It’s strange,” he said against her hair. “All the things that seemed impossible turned out not to be.”

That wave again, crashing over her. Fear and loneliness. Rey could understand that.

“I’m going to speak to somebody, when we get home. Someone professional.”

As she spoke she rubbed small circles along his chest with her finger, watching the pressure whiten the skin, then colour come rushing back in as she moved on.

“Good,” Ben said, and there was an edge to his voice which sounded like relief. “That’s really good, Rey.”

“I need to stop pretending my mum didn’t leave me in an airport when I was six, you know?” There was a lump in her throat, and she was mad about it, but she had to press on; that was the point, wasn’t it? “I don’t want to handle all that shit by myself anymore.”

A sharp inhale, and Ben’s arms tightened. Rey’s body hummed with a primal sense of security. His voice was muffled in her hair, but the ferocity soaked through. “You won’t have to.”

Rey kissed his skin; tried to bestow it with all the things they were still bad at saying.

* * *

Her dress, crumpled and creased, would have to do; they couldn’t both return to the party in different clothes, and Ben’s pants were the real casualty of the evening.

“I’ll just say I spilt something on them,” he said, tucking his shirt into his black jeans. He kicked his suitcase shut and shrugged his jacket on. “How do I look?”

Her answer was to kiss him in the bright lights of his and Kaydel’s bedroom; to find her hands at his belt, itching to take the jeans right back off again.

“Ben,” she said, making herself let go. “This weekend—we should— _they_ should get to enjoy the rest of their wedding before we tell them.”

Ben pressed gently at the pulse in Rey’s wrist. It jumped against his thumb. “On Thursday, Poe—he knew Kes meant well, but—he was mad with his dad anyway, for inviting us here early. Poe pretends to be blasé about everything but—he’s very protective. Of both of us. And this, whatever we’re doing now—”

Rey’s mind drilled down to Finn, standing in the driveway. _I can still ask him to leave._

“We'll keep it to ourselves,” she said. “Just for now.”

Ben brushed her hair away from her face, touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers.

“Can I kiss you goodnight?”

“Yes.” Rey leaned into the touch. “Yes, you can kiss me goodnight.”

He held her face in his hands, surprisingly light and gentle; and now Rey felt less like a burning fire and more like something that somebody _loved._

“Goodnight, Rey.” He held her face a moment longer—studied it like this was the last, or the first, time he’d ever seen her—and then he cleared his throat and stepped away to a distance that could be called respectable. “You go first.”

She took a step, then another, back towards the party; literally, because she didn’t want to turn around. Ben stared at her like she was going to disappear. Perhaps he didn’t trust that she wouldn't.

* * *

There were sparklers, and then champagne—which Ben didn’t drink—and then the gradual winding down was in play, guests kissing each other goodnight, designated drivers climbing into their cars. Poe and Finn _farewelled_ the stragglers, but Rey could see the caress of Finn’s hand along his husband’s back _(_ _bloody hell, husband_ _)_  and their heads together, exchanging whispers. Their attention wasn’t really on the party anymore.

Rey cleaned. _Let’s get a start on it before tomorrow,_ Leia had said, and Rey was dutifully picking up paper cups for the recycling, sweeping the parquet, clearing the glasses. Leia ordered Ben to take out the trash because he was the only person whose hands were big enough to hold all the garbage bags at once, and then he was shooed off to bed, hidden from Rey by Leia’s frame and the half-closed kitchen door; but she marked his tread up the stairs until she couldn’t hear it anymore, her cunt fluttering with sense memory.

Perhaps Rey was cleaning to be helpful; perhaps she was hoping it would mask the scent of _Ben_ and _sex_ and _redemption_ on her skin.

Now she handed over the glasses, and Leia lined them up neatly inside the dishwasher. When Leia stood and reached out for the next ones her other hand balled up and massaged gently at the small of her back. She noticed Rey staring and gestured, unperturbed; _next glass, please._

“You know, I can finish this off,” Rey said. “I really don’t mind.”

Even at the end of the day, with her sleeves rolled up in the middle of household chores, Leia Organa looked like royalty; but the daytime formality of her shoulders eased, and she propped herself against the countertop like she was finally allowing herself to switch off.

“If you’re sure.”

Rey nodded.

“Alright.” Leia patted Rey on the shoulder. The kiss she pressed to Rey’s cheek was achingly maternal.

In the doorway she paused, and without turning, said, “I'm glad we're all together again.”

Rey had kissed Ben in this kitchen barely two hours ago, and she had the sudden, absurd thought that some afterimage had been left behind, visible in between blinks; but Leia didn't elaborate, just made one final vague wave over her shoulder and went to bed.

Rey was left with herself and the dishwasher. As she finished loading it she caught her reflection in the rows of glasses; fifty small, distorted Reys all staring back. She had the sudden sensation of being reflected through a prism, separating all her different parts like a spectrum of colour. There was her determination, and her self-doubt; here was her capacity to love, as wide as the ocean on the right day.

She set the dishwasher to run; stepped out of the kitchen, shut off the light. It plunged the entire house into dimness, the last one to go.

Somewhere, a clock called midnight, and a new day began.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're almost at the end, my friends. One more chapter to go.
> 
> Come and talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sciosophia) (and [tumblr](http://sciosophia.tumblr.com)); I really do love hearing from you all!
> 
> My pinned tweet for this fic/my fandom twitter is [here](https://twitter.com/sciosophia/status/1069728354805448704). The tumblr moodboard for this fic is [here](https://sciosophia.tumblr.com/post/181985026025/stunning-moodboard-by-rebelrebelreylo-embersrey). 
> 
> The Spotify playlist for this chapter is [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/mvpud6xluc7nn7ptf5txklw4p/playlist/7xI16GRq7uCyeC90CYJ19a?si=a9h23XnpRJqC9J_gq72UIg). 
> 
> The page dividers were coded using [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35610251/style-hr-with-image) as a guide.


	5. Sunday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to my beta, [RebelRebel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RebelRebel); as always, this chapter is here because of her encouragement and patience.
> 
> Thank you [slipgoingunder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipgoingunder) for very kindly speaking to me about Housing Works Bookstore Cafe (and commiserating with me about having to code too many texts in a chapter), and [LinearA](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinearA) for giving me lots of advice about the New York subway. 
> 
> On twitter, thank you @situationnorma1, @thiscaringlark, @voicedimplosive, @imargarita11, @bettertoflee, @captainkylo, @dankobah, @violethoure666, @AmyWishman, @SciFiMom13, and @briartrash, who all suggested books for Ben to buy in Housing Works. I think (hope??) I managed to fit all of your suggestions in!
> 
> I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sciosophia) and [tumblr](http://sciosophia.tumblr.com) (for now) if you'd like to say hi.
> 
> .

 

 

_Sunday._

The rain began on the highway; a last, late storm to wash away the season. The weather had turned; the road gleamed, reflecting the trees, and the air sang with the scent of water on soil.

Rey gripped the steering wheel, watched the lines of the road rush up towards them and then disappear beneath the car. Her skin prickled with the breeze, breaking in where Rose had rolled down the passenger-side window; and there were echoes, too, of touches that were twelve hours old. Rey felt light; like there were a hundred colourful balloons attached to her shoulders, and she’d float through the roof of the rented Peugeot at any moment.

Rose, in contrast, slouched in the other seat. Her sunglasses reflected the road, two opaque echoes of the Taconic in all its pot-holed, badly maintained glory. “Do you think they’ll sell stomach pumps at the gas station?”

“For your hangover? No. Probably just Alka-Seltzer.”

Rose groaned, and slouched down further.

The gas station, when they pulled off the highway and into the forecourt, was small, but it had what they needed; antacids and restrooms. They bought one, and made use of the other.

“How are you feeling?” Rey asked, leaning against the sinks. A mirror ran along behind them, several feet by several feet, so that it reflected the scene back like a painting. She could see her own profile in the corner of her eye.

Rose splashed her face with cold water, spattered droplets on the mirror. “I feel like there was tequila.”

Rey had been absent for the liquor-based part of the night. The reason why tumbled through her head— _I dreamed of this, every day you were gone_ —and she cleared her throat, adjusted the touch of her hip against chipped Formica. Excitement flared in her lungs, fuelled by memory. Rey’s only hangover was a patchwork of emotions which refused to calm down.

Rose ran the tap again. Rey’s phone buzzed in her back pocket, wedged between denim and her wallet. Its noise was hidden by the rushing water, but she stilled all the same. It was her heart that felt loud, beating to the question of _Ben?_ , and she wondered, irrationally, if Rose could hear it.

It _was_ Ben (of course, _of course_ it was), and she tried to look nonchalant, like it could have been anybody, even as her phone shook inside the cocoon of her hands. He was ahead of them on the highway, extra time to account for his drive to Leia’s place in Oyster Bay Cove and then back from Long Island to Manhattan. Rey had said goodbye to him in stolen kisses, hiding behind the side of the house like teenagers in the first blush of love. The rain had hung in the morning air, ready to birth the world anew.

Ben Solo  
  
**Ben:** Remind me not to kiss you near any well-lit kitchen windows in future.

Her smile was pulled from her without permission, so wide that it made her face ache.

**Rey:** noted  
**Rey:** how come?  
Ben is typing...

She watched him type, but she knew what it would be before he said it.

**Ben:** Because my mom knows.  
**Ben:** You know her annoying habit of noticing just the right thing at the right time?  
**Ben:** That.  


Rey leaned further into the bite of the Formica against her hip. Vaguely, she was aware of the tap being turned off.

**Rey:** what did she say  
**Ben:** Not much.  
**Ben:** Just that she’s glad you’re back.  
Ben is typing...

The bubbles appeared again, then stopped, then re-started.

**Ben:** I am too.  


“Who’re you texting?”

Rose’s voice cut through the curve of Rey’s fingers, poised to type, and she clamped them over the screen, a reflex which made her look instantly guilty.

It was the upper hand, and for a split-second Rose had it; but then her own phone buzzed, jumping across the Formica and down into the sink. She flushed, scrabbling for it against wet porcelain, and now it was Rey narrowing her eyes and asking, “Who are _you_ texting?”

Rose blushed further. The rush of Rey’s victory drained away; something serious settled in its place. She stepped forward into Rose’s space, and her reflection did the same.

“ _Are_ you texting somebody?”

The verb was weighted; not texting, but _texting_ , and everything that implied.

Rose pulled her sleeve down, pinched it in place with her fingers to wipe water from the screen. It lit up and then went dark again, confused by the static charge of the polyester.

“Kaydel.”

For the second time in as many days, Rey felt the Earth shift and resettle beneath her. The weekend shuttered across her vision like film frames, and she was back in the garden, watching Ben watching Kaydel watching— _Rose_.

“Oh,” was all she could say. Rose’s face crumpled with worry, and Rey shook her head, gave it all the vehemence she could muster. “No, no, it’s not—I’m just surprised.”

Rose relaxed. “Good. Okay. I thought maybe you might—because of Finn…?”

“Finn wants you to be happy as much as I do.”

“I know.” Rose covered her face with her hands. It muffled her voice. “It’s just—obviously it’s complicated.”

 _You don’t say,_ Rey thought.

 _Do you want me to stop the car?_ Rose had said on Thursday, driving past the sign for Skygazer Hill Lodge and towards Rey’s fate. _We don’t have to go in straight away. If you want to talk about it._

She looped her arm over Rose’s shoulders. “Do you want to talk about it?”

* * *

_No more secrets_ , Rey had said, shortening the weekend into a Ben-based _précis_. Rose, for her part, nodded stoically and refrained from comment. Rey suspected that would come once they were back on the road.

Rose paid for the Alka-Seltzer while Rey waited in the car. She could see her at the cash register from where they were parked.

**Rey:** rose knows  
**Rey:** i hope thats ok  
**Rey:** it felt right to tell her  
Ben is typing...

She felt guilty for leaving the conversation so abruptly— _I am too_ —and started again.

**Rey:** and sorry i didnt reply! got caught up talking  
**Rey:** not to be cheesy but i am three ;)  
**Rey:** GETTIT??xxx  


Ben stopped typing, began again.

**Ben:** Very humorous, Dr. J.  


_Dr. J._ The use of the title was an unexpected aphrodisiac. Rey shifted in the driver’s seat, cleared her throat in the empty car. She’d file that away for later.

**Ben:** And I understand.  
**Ben:** Kay guessed in about five seconds.  


Her stomach did a weird flip—more of the emotional hangover, this part less pleasant—god, she’d need to train herself out of this—but it made sense. Perhaps they’d had exactly the same conversation.

Her phone buzzed again.

**Ben:** Did she say anything else?  


Sometimes, Ben was as transparent as glass.

**Rey:** kaydel told you huh  
**Ben:** Yes.  
**Ben:** She’s worried about Finn.  
**Ben:** She shouldn’t be. He’ll want Rose to be happy.  
**Ben:** Which I told her. I hope you don’t mind.  
**Ben:** You know him better than I do.  
**Ben:** I just can’t imagine he’d get upset.  


Rey’s heart twisted again, shedding the echoes of pain, softening into something safe and tender and light. She’d had this before, all the mundane details of being with someone—of talking about your day and your work and your friends—but there had been an edge to it; like standing near a tornado, waiting for the wind to pick you up. Now the skies were clear.

As if in sympathy, the real clouds parted and the patter of rain on the roof began to slow.

**Rey:** i told rose the exact same thing so  
**Rey:** i don’t mind at all  
**Rey:** thanks for giving him the credit  
**Ben:** He’s a good man. He deserves it.  


_I love you_ , she thought, out of nowhere, with a fervour that felt almost violent.

Rose cauterised the thought by emerging from the gas station store, the door banging behind her as she crossed the forecourt.

“I got you some Goldfish,” she said, throwing the box through the open door and onto Rey’s lap. “And soda.”

It was a tiny gesture, but it glowed inside Rey’s heart all the same.

Rose sat in the passenger seat, threw her head back and took two large, long gulps of her Alka-Seltzer. When she was done her head dropped forward, and she ran the can along her forehead.

“Better?” Rey asked gently.

“Better.”

Quiet. The highway buzzed in the background, hidden by a line of trees. Rose opened her eyes and set the can down on the dashboard.

She turned to Rey. “So, who talks first?”

It felt— _good_ , even pushing against years of instinctual blindness. _Pretend it’s not happening_ , her brain whispered, and Rey breathed and kept forming the facts on her tongue.

“So…I guess Ben’s not _nothing_ ,” Rose said. She put the last word in quote marks.

Rey sipped her soda. “No. Not nothing.”

A pause.

“I didn’t realise.” Rose’s voice was quiet. “About Kaydel.”

“It’s okay. You’d never met her either. Why would you?”

“Still. I knew enough that I could have told you not to _worry_.”

 _It wouldn’t have mattered_ , Rey wanted to say. It had been Ben she was taking cues from; his silence she was reading into.

Rey shrugged. “We got there in the end.”

“Well, don’t blame yourself. Ben should have been honest with you.”

“I know.” _I put you through a lot of shit._ “He knows too.”

“ _Good_.” Rose was fierce. “I get that you—” and she gestured, a wave of her hand to stand in for Rey’s emotions, “—but I can’t forgive him as easily as you can.”

Rey wanted to explain the inexplicable—that she’d hurt Ben too, holding him back from the last fragments of her damaged heart, still scattered in the departure lounge of Almería Airport—but Rose was predisposed to be on Rey’s side, and that would never balance out.

“No, I get it.” _You’re being a good friend._

Rose sighed. “I guess all I can do is make sure you’re happy?”

It reminded Rey of her school reports; years of _‘she is a happy child but she struggles to make friends’_ set down over and over in different handwriting.

She thought of Ben, touching her cheek, free of all those sharp lines that had once characterised his face; of her own words, echoing back. _I’m going to speak to somebody, when we get home._

“I think,” she said, looking down at the soda in her hands, “that I will be. Soon.”

A pause; and then Rose said, “Okay. Okay.”

Rey rubbed the edge of the can, watched beads of condensation flatten and stretch out under her thumb.

“And I don’t mind about you and—and Kaydel.” She’d have to get used to that name in her mouth. “Honestly, I like her. Even when I thought—” _Even when I thought she was breaking my heart._ “She’s nice, and she’s funny, and clever. You deserve someone like that.”

Rose hunched in the passenger seat, frowned at the windscreen. “If you’re sure. I don’t want to—to mess things up, or make things worse.”

Guilt lanced through Rey; Rose should have been giddy with possibility, not confined by someone else’s past and its sharp edges.

“Totally sure.” She slid further down in the driver’s seat, so they were the same height, and curled up like it was a pyjama party and not a gas station forecourt. “Which means you have to tell me if you _kissed_?”

A moment, Rose still staring through the windscreen, biting her lip—and then she shrieked; threw her hands over her face, split by a grin, and squirmed in the passenger seat so that her heels kicked against the footwell. It was a universal sign.

Rey laughed, a giggle which rolled up from her belly and through her chest, blooming with joy. Yes; she could feel it on the horizon, drawing closer. Happiness.

* * *

Their apartment was cold, a typical overreaction to Brooklyn’s drop in temperature, and it was a few days too early for heat season to kick in and require the landlord to turn up the radiators.

“I’m going to sit on this couch and not move for a week,” Rose said, sinking into the cushions, and Rey set water on the stove to heat, checked her phone.

**Ben:** Home yet?  
**Rey:** yes just got in  
**Rey:** you?  
**Ben:** My mom made me stay for a half hour and drink tea and TALK but yes, finally, I am home.  
**Ben:** I’m glad you got back okay.  
**Rey:** you too x  


_Electric kettles_ , she thought, taking the trà đắng tea from the cupboard and warming the teapot with the heated water. That was what Rey missed about the UK.

Five episodes into _Parks and Rec_ , Rose fell asleep. Rey tucked her further inside her blanket and then crept from the sofa, tip-toeing across the floor.

Her own room was lit by sunshine. Rey sat on the bed and folded her hands in her lap, looked at the walls. Still the same—photographs, prints, a NASA poster she’d stolen from a conference, all tacked up against bare, badly insulated brick—but it felt like it belonged to someone else. It was Ben who’d never set foot in this apartment; Ben who’d never had to apply all his strength to the window when it stuck in the frame; Ben who’d never piled blankets and quilts onto the bed in the dead of winter. And yet. It was Rey who’d returned to a stranger’s bedroom.

Ben’s apartment had been permanently warm; and she’d known he was always too hot, could tell from the way he tugged at his t-shirts, or took them off completely (about which she didn’t complain), but he never opened a window, even when it bothered him. Ben had known that Rey grew up in the desert; had known that the cold still bothered her.

Everything about his apartment flooded back; the feeling of real floorboards under foot, the way light fell through the windows, the scent of his aftershave and laundry detergent haunting the air. Everything she’d made herself forget.

She dug her phone from her pocket.

**Rey:** can i come over  


There was an interminable pause in which Rey’s pulse sped up, as if the text was a step too far— _perhaps it is_ , her brain said, treacherous—but then:  

**Ben:** yes  


She smiled at the lack of capital letters and punctuation. Ben only did that when he was typing in a rush.

**Ben:** Of course.  
**Ben:** Everything okay?  
**Rey:** honestly never better  
**Rey:** anyway rose is asleep and i just  


A few seconds as she thought about what to say; and then her phone buzzed, the screen blurring out, replaced with Ben’s number, and she slid her thumb across with that familiar answering _click_.

“You sure you’re okay?”

The lowest notes of his voice were made tinny by the speaker, but it still hit her the way it always did.

“Hi. Yes, really, I’m fine. I just—” _Miss you. Somehow. Already_. And really, what was the harm in saying so? “I know it’s sappy as fuck but—I miss you.”

“Yes. That is sappy as fuck. And reciprocated.”

“Good.” The route appeared in her head; the walk to the subway, taking the J to Manhattan. Worth it. Except—  “Do you…do you still...?”

There was a miniscule pause, a well which contained all the pain they would have to work through, and then Ben said, gently, “Yes. I still live here.”

“Great. Okay. Give me an hour.”

* * *

The clouds had stayed upstate. The low rise of Brooklyn was bathed in sunshine and the sudden chill in the air, and Rey watched it pass from the roll-and-stop, roll-and-stop, roll-and-stop of the subway as it paused at Gates Av, at Kosciuszko St, at Myrtle Av.

She was used to seeing her old Williamsburg haunts from above, staring down from the elevation of the subways rails, but as they wound over the Broadway Triangle, past the tops of yellow-red trees and multicoloured graffiti on whitewashed brick, Rey was acutely aware of the time those places occupied; of being twenty-three and in the first flush of love, unaware that problems in a relationship wouldn’t just go away if she stopped thinking about them.

Now, as they made their gradual ascent up to the Williamsburg Bridge, light flickering through the criss-cross steel keeping the subway separate from the road traffic, everything shifted, just slightly. Same story, same subway line; different day, month, year, _Rey_.

In Manhattan, she got out at Chambers St and walked in a straight line for three blocks, past City Hall Park and the DoJ and the Starbucks on the corner of West Broadway. Her feet still knew the route; she was forced to concentrate on her butterflies, agitated by each step, so that it felt like she was constantly reaching the top of a rollercoaster and plunging down again. They’d been safe in the bubble of the wedding; now she was back in the bustle of Manhattan, where all their problems began, and Rey was afraid.

She stopped at the crosswalk. The people behind her exclaimed their displeasure and kept walking, water flowing around a stone. Her mind hummed with a presiding thought: _I could just turn around and get back on the subway._

Her phone buzzed in her jacket—rough, cheap corduroy from Kmart, the men's section specifically, which meant the pockets were deep enough for her phone and wallet and keys. She fumbled it into the open air, wondering what Ben would say, if it would make her change her mind—

Finn Dameron  
  
**Finn:** we're heeeeere  
**Finn:** guatemala is BEAUTIFUL  


Of course. Rey smiled, as much of an instinct as sight and speech when it came to Finn. _Don't miss me too much_ , he'd said all those hours ago, with an edge of seriousness. Poe had been loading their bags into the boot of the _X-Wing_ , ready for the drive to the airport and the flight out to his family in Guatemala City; a stopover before Peru and the real honeymoon of climbing Machu Pichu. In the early morning Finn had looked so _happy_ , with his tired grin and the light glancing off his wedding ring.

**Rey:** amazing!  
**Rey:** so glad you landed safe  
**Rey:** send hubby my love  


She put her phone back in her pocket. The traffic light had turned red again, and the crowd buzzed behind her; now they were water stuck up against a dam, save for the jaywalkers breaking through like droplets.

Her heart settled; her butterflies calmed. Finn; her touchpoint of safety, like always.

 _Catastrophising_ , she thought as the red hand turned into a green man, and the dam broke.

Ben's building was vivid red brick broken by arched windows and the angular meander of the fire escape. She hit the buzzer for the top floor and waited.

“Hey.” Ben's voice was metallic, echoing into the street.

Another buzz as the door unlocked, and Rey pushed into the lobby and the wall of warmth which came with it. Ben's building had no problem keeping above the mandated 68°F.

The elevator clanked upwards, and when she stepped out Ben was waiting in the hallway. “Hi.”

All of Rey’s nerves evaporated. “Hi.”

He reached out, and she took his hand; let him walk her backwards into the apartment through the open door, let him kiss her as they went. He touched her like it had been years, not hours. But then, she reminded herself, pressing into the shape and feel of him, until hours ago, it had been years.

His hand was warm on her back, and every scent was familiar; Ben’s laundry detergent and stripped wooden floors and—

...cardboard?

She opened her eyes, leaned back, and saw two boxes in the middle of the empty, cavernous room. A record-scratch-freeze-frame moment as her mouth fell open, and then—

“You’re _moving_?”

Her voice echoed against the walls as she stepped back. Ben chased after her with his hands but didn’t follow.

“Rey—”

Where were Luke’s offices? She stumbled over the list in her head. She was sure, _so sure_ Luke had said New York, but there was Chicago, Los Angeles, _London_ —how could Ben move to a place she’d sworn she’d never go back to?

“You’re moving,” she said again, struggling to process all the hollow spaces where Ben’s things had been. _You're leaving._ “And you still let me—we still—”   

 _You still let me believe_.

She turned, and this time Ben did chase her; did grab her by the wrist, so that she stopped short of the door.

“Rey.”

She stayed stubbornly still.

“Rey,” he repeated. It was gentle; perhaps that was why she let him turn her until they were face to face. She concentrated on Ben and not the vast blankness behind him.

“Yes, I am moving,” he said, tone modulated, like she was a frightened animal. Perhaps she was. “But I am moving—”

He broke off, shoulders shaking.

Rey frowned. “Why are you _laughing_?”

Ben took her face in his hands. “Rey. I’m moving to _Brooklyn_.”

That record-scratch-freeze-frame again. Everything in Rey’s head paused, waiting for her to drag an answer from her subconscious.

“...but you hate Brooklyn.”

Her voice came out smaller than she’d meant it to. Ben’s eyes fluttered closed for a moment and he bit his lip, curling up at the corners.

“I hate weird millennial Brooklyn.” He let go and stepped back. He was a dark outline against the echoing space of the loft. “Not Brooklyn Heights.”

 _Oh._ Rey felt her tension drain. Her shoulders dropped; her brows uncreased. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Ben shrugged. His tone drifted into seriousness. "Manhattan's wrung me out."

He fiddled with a belt loop on his jeans, and it abruptly struck Rey that he was nervous. Her panic receded, and she stepped into the space he'd left. When she wound her arms around him Ben was warm and solid, and his heartbeat was steady and a little fast beneath her ear. It was a mnemonic; the same heart against her own over and over again, years ago and yesterday.

"Manhattan's loss," she murmured into his t-shirt. "What happens to this place?"

"We sold it.”

“But what about—?” The family history which had bled into every surface. _Padme at Georgica Beach April 1960._

“Mom didn’t want it hanging over us anymore.” He extricated himself but kept a hold of her hand. “Too many dinner plates thrown at the walls.”

Rey hummed, half-imagination, half-memory. She squeezed Ben’s hand and let go. The loft was filled with that cold sunshine, bleeding through glass and catching the dust in the air. There were still signs of life—the Keurig machine on the counter; Ben’s MacBook next to it; the edge of a mattress, visible through the bedroom door—but it was a shell, stripped of the history the Skywalkers and Solos had given to it.

Rey could remember where each piece of furniture had been the last time she’d seen it. _Couch_ , she thought, wandering into the space, inclined to walk around objects which were no longer there. _Desk, floor lamp, rug_.

“When?”

“Thursday. Everything’s in the new place.” He gestured to the boxes. “This is all donations.”

Rey stood over them, peered down into the depths. The nearest one had two history books, a coffee mug which said _lawyer fuel_ , an unopened set of Menorah candles.

“I could help, if you like. Take it all down to Housing Works, or something?”

“Yes. I would like that.” Ben crossed his arms, uncrossed them again, shifted from foot to foot. “And—I’d like to show you the new apartment sometime. If you want.”

“Yes.” Rey smiled. “Yes, I want that.”

 _I love you_ , she thought again, and as the silence held she felt the words coalesce, ready to roll off her tongue—

Ben’s cell must have been on the kitchen counter; the ferocity of the noise which cut through them could only come from Apple aluminium against marble.

“Shit.” Ben muttered. He swiped it up, mouthed _the realtor_ at Rey, and answered. “Hi, Nien.”

Rey’s racing heart had nowhere to go; she exhaled, harder than a normal breath, and hoped Ben hadn’t noticed. His back was turned, one arm bent up to hold the cell to his ear, and it was making his bicep deliciously round under his Henley.

Rey cleared her throat, shook the words and the rush of lust away, and sat down amongst the boxes. The apartment was empty enough for Ben’s conversation to bounce off the walls. She crossed her legs and pulled the top of the box back. Underneath the mug, something caught the light, and she leaned in to see.

It was a stack of books, well-used, dust jackets bashed and flattened and worn down where they’d been read over and over. She recognised the titles like they were stamped into her own soul. Children’s Services had kept a set at Islington Council, and Rey had devoured _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_ whilst the social workers tried to work out where her mother was.

She drew all seven out and balanced them on her knee, picked the top one off the pile. They weren’t in order. She was holding the fourth book; _Prince Caspian_.

"Are you really getting rid of these?" she asked as Ben ended his call, as he set his iPhone back down on the counter.

His legs appeared in her peripheral vision. She felt him brush gently, briefly at her hair, and then he crouched down beside her, took one of the books. It looked smaller in his hand.

"They're just taking up space," he said.

"Is this you letting the past die?"

Ben's smile twitched briefly and faded, attention caught on _The Voyage of the Dawn Treader_. He twisted his wrist to look at the illustration on the back; Reepicheep, resplendent in his coat and feather. "Something like that."

“They were your father’s,” Rey said gently.

Musty-scented, pages yellowed, turned by two generations of Solo hands. _That’s what I remember the most_ , Ben had said once. _His voice, when he was reading them to me._

“I never look at them anymore.” Ben’s voice was soft; it felt like he was reasoning with himself.

"Maybe." Rey gently plucked the book from Ben's hand and stacked it with the others. She set them aside, away from the donations. "But you’d miss them all the same."

* * *

They walked to the Housing Works on Crosby Street. _Isn’t the box heavy?_ Ben had asked, and Rey had hefted it onto her hip and said, _What happened to ‘I’m stronger than I know’?_ before threatening him with taking a roundabout journey on a city bus instead.

“I still can’t believe you think Edmund should have stayed with the White Witch,” she said at the crosswalk. She adjusted her hold on the box and heard the contents—minus the books—shift around inside. Despite what she’d said, her arms were getting fatigued.

Ben reached over and took the box with one arm.

Rey scowled. “Hey—”

“When did I say that?”

He stacked the two boxes together and picked them up again, tucked into his arms and under his chin. The light went green. The road here was made of uneven bricks, and Rey grabbed Ben’s elbow to keep him steady, checked the traffic before walking them over.

“Don’t trip,” she grumbled, then kept her hand tucked in between Ben’s arm and the boxes. “I distinctly remember you saying that Edmund’s siblings didn’t appreciate him and he should have, and I quote, _let them all get turned into stone.”_

“Oh.” He let her guide him around a woman and a dog. “That.”

“Yes, that.”

“I revised my opinion.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I was doing a lot of projecting.”

She looked up, saw the tension in Ben’s shoulders and back. Perhaps it was from holding two full boxes of donations; perhaps it wasn’t.

“Oh.” _Snoke._ “Okay.”

It was another dynamic which had passed her by; what would parentless, thrown-away Rey know about familial schisms, about reconciliation? She was about to swallow the feeling away—that empty inadequacy which whispered _you are beyond repair_ —but then Ben stopped, like he’d somehow felt it in the grasp of her hand on his arm.

“What you need to take away from this,” he said, “is that you were right about the Pevensies, and I should have listened to you.”

He weighted each word. _I should have listened to you_. Over the top of the boxes, he smiled. It was such a small platitude, on the surface, but his tone buried itself in her heart, a metaphor for three years of pleas; _Ben, they’re your family_. Now he was looking at her like nothing about the future could phase him.

Rey smiled, words too soft to have any real force. “I’ll hold you to that.”

* * *

They’d dropped the donations and gone four steps along the street before Ben said _hold on_ and took her hand, led Rey into the Bookstore Cafe next door.

“I saw a Times article about this place once. It’s in that film I like,” Rey said, climbing the half-spiralled staircase. “The fate one.”

“The movie where Kate Beckinsale is an attractive therapist?” At Rey’s raised eyebrows, Ben added, “What? She’s attractive and she plays a therapist.”

“Fine. I can’t argue.”

She trailed her hand along the bookshelves; floor-to-ceiling, stuffed with multi-coloured spines. She could see Chrissy Teigan’s cookbook, and Pablo Neruda next to it, misfiled amongst the food section. Ben was following a step behind her, and the floorboards creaked as they drifted along the upper balcony. Even with the sun outside, everything had the taste and scent and feel of an old library on a rainy day.

“You’ve really never been here?” Ben asked.

There were books stacked on the edge of a nearby shelf, as though someone had meant to put them back and then forgotten— _A Tale of Two Cities_ , _Persuasion_ , _Tom Jones, Winesburg Ohio_ —and Ben began to leaf through them.

“No. It’s beautiful.”

Ben hummed; not so much a response as a thought which had yet to escape his mouth.

Rey glanced at him over her shoulder; turned, walked backwards until she reached the far wall. Her back hit the shelves—she could feel their edges under her coat—and she watched Ben, a foot or so away, shuffling through _Frankenstein_ and _The Perks of Being a Wallflower_ and _Hitchhiker’s Guide_.

“Do you regret it?” she said. His head snapped up so quickly that she added hastily, “Keeping your father’s books, I mean. Now that we’re here.”

“Oh.” He put the rest aside, except for the copy of _Nobody's Fool_. “No. You were right about that.”

“Good. Okay.”

Ben looked over the edge of the balcony; frowned at the people down below who were drinking coffee and browsing books, even though it was clear he wasn’t quite seeing them.

“My mom’s not a reader,” he said, voice soft enough to blend with the store’s hum. “That is—she likes reading. She just doesn’t have time. But my dad would read everything. Pulp fiction paperbacks. Buzzfeed. Car manuals.”

She thought of Ben at the table in Dutchess County, reading the _Harvard Law Bulletin_. “Like you.”

“Yes. Like me.”

He gripped the balcony’s edge—squeezed once, knuckles whitening—and let go.

“You remember,” Rey began, “how I didn’t go to school when I was in Spain? And the UK had to catch me up?” Ben nodded. “Well, I could read already.”

“Shit, Rey,” he said softly.

“Yeah.” She looked at the shelves beside her. Somehow it was easier to think out loud when she wasn’t looking at Ben. “I always figured, at least my mum loved me enough to teach me how to read.”

He exhaled, and there was a split-second where Rey was afraid of the consequences; but he only tugged her away from the shelf and held her hand, looked her in the eye and said, “You’re worth more than some—some _basic_ parenting. You know that, right?”

Bright sunshine. Sand in her shoes. Her mother’s voice, sounding out syllables.

“I think,” she said, looking down at her hand in Ben’s, “that I will know. Soon.”

Ben smiled, small and a little sad.

“You hungry?” he asked. He bit his lip, as though his question was really, _will this be okay?_

“Yes,” she said.

* * *

The sun was setting, casting slanted orange light over the tops of skyscrapers. It bisected the city in two; the light above and the shadow below.

“Do you think we should date?” Rey said.

Ben stopped, and because she was holding his hand, Rey stopped too; a jolt which locked her elbow and then pinged her back to him, like an elastic band.

“Date?”

“Yeah.” She moved again, until her arm was stretched out; anchored to Ben, unable to go any further unless she let go of his hand. “Coffee. Dinner. Movies. That kind of thing.”

“I know what dates are.” Ben still hadn’t moved. “Is that what you want? To be…dating?”

“What? No, not dating like…at the beginning, when you see other people. Just dating each other. Why?” Her heart sped up. “Do _you_ want to be dating?”

“No.” Ben unrooted himself from the pavement and caught up with her. “I just—what you said yesterday. About not wasting time—”

“No, I know, I meant that. I’m not saying we should go _backwards_ from where we are—” _Like riding a bike, except way, way better,_ “—I just think...”

Their strides were matched now, a brisk New Yorkers’ pace. Rey looked down at their shoes passing over the paving slabs, each piece somehow a different grey, worn slightly differently, pitted with dirt and old gum or cracked in half.

“We’re different people now,” she said. “So it might be…nice, to learn who we are again.”

A moment of Manhattan quiet, full of traffic and people and noise, until Ben said, “Want to hear something amusing?”

“Amusing?”

“This sounds like my parents.”

“Your _parents_?”

“Yes. Their entire marriage was a rough patch, but—when I was maybe, twenty-five? They changed things. Dad would go out, Mom would dress up for the theatre or whatever, and then he’d ring the doorbell. Like he was taking her to prom.”

Rey’s perception of them bloomed, changed a little. Han and Leia had seemed to be in each other’s corner in a way that sometimes, guiltily, made Ben’s memories hard to imagine.

“Really?”

“ _We’re appreciating each other more_. That’s what Dad would say.” Ben quietened. “It worked.”

The pause was filled by the rumble of the subway under their feet, by the vague updraft through the grate beside them.

“That’s the thing,” Rey said; found that her mouth was dry, forcing her to swallow before she spoke again. “I still have a—a long way to go, and I want you to be sure of what you’re getting into. I’m not _fixed_ yet, and I don’t know if I ever will be—”

“Rey. We’re not broken watches that need new batteries.” When she didn't reply Ben squeezed her hand and prompted, “Yes?”

“Yeah.”

“We'll make mistakes. But we'll _talk_ about them. That's the deal this time. Work as a _team_.” He stopped walking, held her gaze. “Because we'll make a pretty fucking great one.”

“A team,” Rey repeated. _Like Finn and Poe. Like Han and Leia._

“If that’s what you want, yes.”

“Yes. That’s what I want.”

They were on the corner of Chambers Street again; back by City Hall Park, its trees losing their red-and-yellow leaves, and if they turned right and kept walking there would be the DoJ and the Starbucks and the jaywalkers again too. Rey wondered if life was simply a set of concentric circles, taking you back to the same places you’d already been.

“I hate it when I sound like Dr Kenobi,” Ben muttered.

_Back to the same people, too._

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For leaving.”

Ben frowned. “You don’t need to apologise.”

“But—”

“I don’t blame you for leaving. You understand that, don’t you? That you did the right thing?”

“But I abandoned you.” Rey’s own words cut into her, as overwhelming as a tide. She’d never said it out loud. _I did the one thing I promised I’d never do to anybody._

Ben shook his head. “You couldn’t abandon me. I wasn’t there anymore.”

Her eyes felt warm. Self-aimed irritation spread through her, and Rey clenched her jaw, thought, _don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry_. Ben brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers, and when they came away they were shining.

“I wanted to stay,” Rey said, with salt water on her tongue. “I really, really wanted to stay.”

“I’ll be better,” Ben promised. “This time, I’ll be better.”

She kissed him, and even if it was wet and a little uncoordinated, it felt like _home_.

“I love you,” she said before she’d quite realised it.

Ben smiled; no, not a smile—it was that rare wide grin, the one she’d liked best and forced herself to forget.

“Good.” His voice was rounded with joy, pushing at the edge of his syllables. “It suits you.” He brushed the last trace of her tears away; then glanced at her feet. “Rey, you know you’ve been walking around with your shoelace undone?”

He knelt down, and began to tie it for her. Rey combed her fingers through his hair, soft and familiar under her touch. Across from them she could see City Hall, framed by autumnal branches. What had she said? That she’d elope or wait in line at City Hall, or never marry at all?

 _Maybe_ , she thought, looking at Ben down on one knee. But this—being here together; being _a team_ —that, Rey decided, was enough.

He muttered a gently victorious _a-hah_ , and stood up.

“Ready?” Ben asked.

He held out his hand, and Rey took it.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m ready.”

 

 

 

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are. The end of this little journey. Thank you so, _so_ much for every piece of encouragement, every tweet, every discord flail, every comment, every kudos, every kind word. I'm so grateful, in ways I can never express. I haven't felt this way about a fandom in a long time, and you are all a part of that. Thanks especially to The Writing Den, a place full of wonderful people who write, draw, and chat their hearts out; you have made me feel endlessly welcome. And, whilst I am a slow-poke about it, I will be replying to every comment on this fic; please be assured that I see and appreciate your words, and will respond in kind.
> 
> Lastly: this fic is here because of [RebelRebel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RebelRebel), a generous, patient, and endlessly supportive beta who convinced me that this story was worth enough to see the light of day. She has seen me through crises of confidence and plot musings and the days when I just couldn't get words on the page. I will forever be grateful that I sent that DM.
> 
> A few notes:
> 
> Congratulations to [ladybex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladybex/pseuds/ladybex) for calling the Kaydel/Rose romance all the way back in Chapter 3.
> 
> [trà đắng](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_tea) is a Vietnamese tea.
> 
> Ben's [Chronicles of Narnia](https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22450168125&searchurl=kn%3Dset%2Bor%2Bcomplete%26tn%3Dthe%2Bchronicles%2Bof%2Bnarnia%26sortby%3D20%26fe%3Don&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title1) set, published in 1950.
> 
> [Housing Works](https://www.housingworks.org/) is a New York City based non-profit. It has thrift stores across the city and a well-known Bookstore Cafe. The film Rey refers to is [_Serendipity_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity_\(film\)), one of my favourite New York films.
> 
> The Spotify playlist for this chapter is [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/mvpud6xluc7nn7ptf5txklw4p/playlist/30FpNRtaRoVbZIRQv6VEAx?si=vNkq1xPkTgiQN7xW68k_YA). 
> 
> The page dividers were coded using [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35610251/style-hr-with-image) as a guide.
> 
> Come and talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sciosophia) (and [tumblr](http://sciosophia.tumblr.com))! My pinned tweet for this fic/my fandom twitter is [here](https://twitter.com/sciosophia/status/1069728354805448704).


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